It's been a while since I've seen anything about green roofs in the press, but look what the Guardian has today: Campaign for rooftop gardens.
A campaign to lift scraps of urban countryside on to the rooftops will start today at the first national conference on "green" roofs.
Calls for compulsory roof-garden conditions in the government's drive to redevelop so-called city brownfield sites will be made by some 150 planners, architects and experts on "plants in the sky".
The move follows a London campaign to save the small Black Redstart bird, whose brownfield habitat at Deptford Creek was built more than 10 years ago. Thousands of acres of plants embedded in crushed-brick on top of flats and office blocks provide havens for the birds. (...)
The Green Roofs for Healthy Cities conference at Sheffield University will hear that Deptford Creek became "a fantastic wilderness". Matthew Frith of the Peabody Trust, which has three green roofs on its social housing estates in London, said: "I was at one of our original Victorian tenement blocks this week and up on the roof they've got the only fruiting olive tree I've ever seen in London." [full article]
I thought it was a cool idea to start with, but the idea of a fruiting olive tree in London has me totally convinced. Do you think we could pull that off in Vancouver?
Posted on September 22, 2003 11:55 PM. Filed under: environment.