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City gardens
Dirt
Up On The Roof
Designer: Jennifer Hirsch
Sponsors: Xchanging, The Jane Goodall Institute
Contractor: dirt
This garden represents an urban roof. The garden designer, Jennifer Hirsch, has followed the progress of green roofs for some time and says that Up On The Roof is a minimalist exploration of the relationship between humans and nature, and the role of plants in bridging the gap and repairing the damage inflicted on the environment through building.
Up On The Roof is raised off the ground to recreate the limited soil conditions of an urban roof. The garden has solar panel screens on two of its boundaries. Polished Purbeck paving stones form a haphazard path carved through a carpet of mounding groundcover, their footprints representing the chaotic expansion of the built environment. Imposing hedges of yew, lit with fibre-optic fireflies of light, and clipped balls of box, Hebe and Coleonema embody the garden of managed landscape cultivated by man across the centuries. The wilder, untamed forms of Cannomois and Echium rising above the clipped balls correspond to the natural landscape: the random placement of mounding plants interspersed with spiring plants is intended to reflect the chaos of natural pattern.
Three golden mean rectangles formed of yew hedging make up the evergreen backbone of the space. Their clipped forms and the balls of box, Hebe and Coleonema contrast with looser habits of echiums and the restio Cannomois virgata. The New Zealand groundcover Scleranthus makes an undulating carpet around the paving and beneath the other planting, ensuring the maximum absorption of rainwater occurs.
The garden designer believes that establishing plant material on rooftops provides a plethora of ecological and economic benefits including stormwater management, energy conservation, and mitigation of the urban heat island effect.