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A Rooftop Garden

© Leda Meredith

 

Several years ago I tended a garden on the rooftop of an apartment building on West 26^th Street in Manhattan. A bit of serendipity brought this to be: one day I found a note under my apartment door from the gentleman who had lived across the hall for 13 years. His note said that he was moving and that there were 20 planter boxes up on the roof that he was hoping I would use. How he knew about my passion for plants, I have no idea because I never actually met or spoke with him. I went up to the roof. It felt like I was discovering a hidden kingdom. There was open sky up there, and rich soil just waiting to be planted. It was early Spring, and a few shoots of green were already showing. I decided to let those grow until they were big enough for me to see what I had inherited from the previous gardener.

Over the four years I lived in that building, I grew tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, all kinds of medicinal and culinary herbs, flowers, even a miniature variety of sweet corn. Mint, portulaca, and wildflowers turned out to be what my benefactor had left, along with a few hardy cacti. Birds, dragonflies, butterflies and bees all found their way to my rooftop sanctuary. The other inhabitants of my building began to haul fold-out lawn chairs up to the roof to sunbathe in Summer, and several of them thanked me for making it a beautiful place to rest in the middle of a hectic city.

One year I got a notice from the landlord saying I had to remove everything from the roof. A little research revealed that the main concerns were how much weight the roof could handle (filled planter boxes are heavy!), and whether there were any containers near the street side of the roof that could potentially fall on passers-by. I made sure all my plants were securely anchored on the weight-supporting beams of the roof and none along the street side edge. I had the other apartment tenants sign a petition saying that they liked having the garden there. An inspector came and approved my arrangement. The garden continued.

I still have plants that originated as seeds or cuttings from that West 26^th Street garden. Their roots are firmly in the earth now, and they seem none the worse for having begun their lives in containers on a sun-baked roof.

The copyright of the article A Rooftop Garden in Urban Homestead is owned by Leda Meredith. Permission to republish A Rooftop Garden in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.