Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls - Hardcover

Nigel Dunnett; Noel Kingsbury

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 088192640X ISBN 13: 9780881926408

Publisher: Timber Press, 2004

Synopsis

The latest techniques for planting roofs and walls to enhance our buildings and benefit the environment. The green roof industry is booming and the technology changing fast as professionals respond to the unique challenges of each new planting. In this comprehensively updated, fully revised edition of their authoritative reference, Nigel Dunnett and Noël Kingsbury reveal the very latest techniques, materials, and plants, and showcase some spectacular new case studies for the non-professional. Green roofs and walls reduce pollution and runoff, help insulate and reduce the maintenance needs of buildings, contribute to biodiversity, and provide habitats for wildlife. In addition to all this, they are attractive to look at and enhance the quality of life of residents. In Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls, Revised and Updated Edition, the authors describe and illustrate the practical techniques required to design, implement, and maintain a green roof or wall to the highest standards. This informative, up-to-the-minute reference will encourage gardeners everywhere to consider the enormous benefits to be gained from planting on their roofs and walls.

About this title

About the Authors

Nigel Dunnett is a Reader in Urban Horticulture in the landscape department at the University of Sheffield, where he has developed innovative research programs on naturalistic and ecologically informed planting for gardens and public landscapes. He is director of The Green Roof Centre, Sheffield, and acts widely as a consultant on green roof design and planting, and sustainable garden and landscape design in general.

He writes regularly for landscape and garden publications, including Gardens Illustrated and The Garden. With Noël Kingsbury he wrote Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls; with Andy Clayden, Rain Gardens: Managing Water Sustainably in the Garden and Designed Landscape.

Noel Kingsbury is a researcher, writer, and teacher. A gardener since childhood, he has run a nursery, designed gardens and public spaces, and done doctoral research at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Landscape on the ecology of ornamental perennials. He lives and gardens in the Welsh Borders near Hay-on-Wye.

Reviews

Green roofs are a hot topic, and one that constitutes a trend extending well beyond the world of gardening. This sourcebook brings together a fascinating amount of data, covering the actual logistics of how to implement plantings on roofs and building facades. Dunnett and Kingsbury look at examples of ornamental projects while stressing the concept's solid link to the environment. Examinations of recent research underline the wide-ranging benefits of greening buildings, from recreational aspects to increased energy efficiency. Among the most positive changes to emerge are improvements in the air we breathe and the support of biodiversity. Given the lively current interest in how to extend living ecosystems that reach beyond the ground plane to the upper stories of our homes and office buildings, this resource offers important technical advice, along with horticultural recommendations pertinent to flat or sloped roofs and the greening of vertical surfaces. Undoubtedly, other manuals will appear as an interest in living roofs increases. At present, the material compiled here will be welcomed by a wide audience. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The contemporary use of plants on roofs and walls is distinguished from previous uses by the integration of planting and its supporting structures with the construction of the buildings themselves, as well as the use of modern materials. The result is a dovetailing of living plants, the building, and its human users, a closeness and integration not easy to achieve with older construction technologies. It is important to appreciate the distinction between older technologies of plant use and the new.

Old-style roof gardens either restricted the planting to containers and planters or used a layer of soil spread onto a roof surface, which had to be massively stronger than would otherwise need to be the case. New-style roof greening recognizes two distinct approaches, intensive and extensive.

Intensive roof greening is similar to the old-style roof gardens, where it is expected that people would use the area much as a conventional garden. Plants are maintained on an individual basis in the same way as they would in a garden at ground level. Soil depth is generally at least 15 cm (6 in) deep, but now may be composed of lightweight growing media, and is thus more correctly known as substrate. Simple intensive green roofs are covered with lawns or ground covering plants that still require regular maintenance, but have thinner substrates and are therefore less costly to install. Access may be possible, but generally these roofs are intended to be overlooked (English Nature 2003).

Extensive roof greening is not intended for regular human usage and may not even be intended to be seen on a regular basis. Plants are treated en masse, rather as grass plants are in a lawn. Any maintenance operation is carried out on them all simultaneously, such as mowing. In any case, maintenance is generally designed to be minimal. Substrate depth can be between 2 and 15 cm (0.8 and 6 in), which reduces the amount of extra loading that must be build onto the roof construction.

Ecoroof is a term used in some places as a substitute for green roof. Some people use the name to describe vegetated roofs as a way to distinguish them from other types of roof that may have an ecological function (such as roofs covered with photovoltaic cells) that can also be called green roofs (using the word green in its popular ecological or environmental sense). Ecoroof has also been taken up as a descriptive term for extensive green roofs in climates that experience very dry periods that cause vegetation to brown or ripen. For example, extensive green roofs in the city of Portland, Oregon, are referred to as ecoroofs because they are not green but brown for much of the growing season and therefore the term green is seen as a misnomer.

Brown roof is a term to describe roofs that have been covered with substrate or loose material but have not been purposefully planted. Brown roofs are created primarily for biodiversity purposes and aim to recreate typical brownfield conditions through the use of by-products of the development of urban sites: brick rubble, crushed concrete, and subsoils. Such roofs may colonize spontaneously with vegetation but the unvegetated loose substrates can also provide habitat for a range of invertebrates and birds.

Edition details

• Publisher: Timber Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 088192640X
• ISBN 13: 9780881926408
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256