Rooftop Gardens Can Be Magical. But They Must be Carefully Planned
Sourced from WA Today
John Rayner can pinpoint the very moment he fell for the allure of a green roof. It was almost 20 years ago, and he was strolling between hedges, under pergolas and alongside bulbs, grasses, shrubs and trees at a newly opened space in Chicago.
Spread over almost 10 hectares, this landscape was so vast and so diverse that it immediately expanded Rayner’s sense of what horticulture could be. Instead of being on the ground, like most gardens, this Millennium Park sat atop multi-level car parks, rail lines and a train station.
Rayner, an associate professor and director of urban horticulture at the University of Melbourne, has since visited green roofs everywhere from Scandinavia to Spain and Singapore. He has seen meadows on top of residential buildings in the Netherlands, wildflowers growing in repurposed rubble on office buildings in central London and healthy olive trees strewn over a cultural centre in Athens.
But just because a particular set of plants flourish on roofs in one place doesn’t necessarily mean they will thrive in another. So, for the past 15 years, Rayner and other researchers at the University of Melbourne have been working to resolve how to make successful green roofs in Australia. They have conducted trials on hundreds of plants to determine which ones can best survive on top of buildings here.
This month, on a planted rooftop at the Victorian Parliament House, they launched a plant guide that specifies the best plants for a range of different sorts of green roof, commonly found in Australia.
From the Living Architecture Monitor
