Rooftops are the most popular and panoramic sites for urban gardens, whether populated by flowers, herbs, vegetables, or small trees.
Living in any big city, on this beaten-up and broken-down planet, you don’t need to ask Al Gore if the stew of belching diesel fumes, phlegm-colored rain, and free-floating molecules of incinerated metal you suck up everyday is hazardous for your health.
Just bopping past a row of stinking, rat-happy trash cans during a tropical heatwave in December, as global leaders dither on about CO2 caps and the invasion of terminator pine beetles, makes you hanker for a little green. Even if it’s only a water lily and a Dominican pond frog floating happily in a mop bucket on your terrace. Little wonder pissed-off metro environmentalists are turning to ponder the green possibilities of the precious few city spaces afforded them - whether rooftops, terraces, window boxes, or even guerilla gardening in the abandoned lot next door.
What Is It?
Urban landscaping involves using any healthy soil you can rustle up to grow flowers or plants in an urban environment. Most urban landscaping is done on rooftops or balconies, but urban gardening happens in abandoned lots that have been assigned to community care. In addition to doing your humble part to contribute to a greener and healthier urban habitat, there other virtues too, say, making friends with the sultry botanist next door.
And urban landscapers - cowabunga - are the eco-crusaders who make green living happen.
Who Needs It?
Urbanites and burghers.
Benefits
Available gardening areas in cities are often seriously lacking, and card-carrying urban landscapers, (easily identified by their soaring ability to cite annual rainfall and temperature statistics in Beijing, Mumbai, and New York), can help navigate the process of growing cool-looking flowers, tasty eggplants, or generating a fecund and wormy compost. Rooftops are the most popular and panoramic sites for urban gardens, whether populated by flowers, herbs, vegetables, or small trees.
The savvy urban landscaper will probably recommend you plant in pots or containers. Containers prevent added weight stress on aging beams, plus they require relatively little waterproofing. Containers don’t have to be fancy. Use coffee cans or the set of Japanese teacups granny laid off on you. Fire up your own clay pots in a neighbor’s kiln, if you’re artsy, then paint them DayGlo pink. If you want to spread some cash around, buy a killer automatic-watering irrigation system. If you’re reading this in Chicago, take a gander at the roof garden atop your City Hall for inspiration.
Urban landscapers can also hip you to hydroponics, a bio-intensive approach to planting that further reduces the need for lugging giant-sized bags of soil up fifteen flights. He or she might expand your knowledge of all things green with vertical gardening – or “living walls” – which need much less space than traditional gardening. Vertical gardening – whether on rooftops, balconies, or the stoop – beautifully eliminates nasty chores like tilling, weeding, and even spraying pesticides all over the place. Your EarthFair alum urban landscaper will also show you how to recycle wastes with composts too. Composting is one of the most environmentally merciful and efficacious ways to fertilize known to man.
