Influenced by Irish stone walls, Dr. Seuss and Rehbein Companies Rooftop Gardens, local garden designer, Molly Moriarty, creates a rooftop garden, on the ground. It's stylish, amusing and practical.
Starting with 'Desert Sunset' stone from Arizona, to create an orange-pink curved wall, is a bit of a fashion statement. And 'why not create a big, bold garden, in the front yard?' says Molly. "It's a necessity really. Summer is the busiest time of year for a garden designer, yet I needed to come up with the perfect garden, for the designer herself. Something creative, yet undemanding. The rooftop garden concept was perfect. I just put it on the ground, rather than the roof."
Rooftop gardens are about catching and using rainwater--to grow plants. In this case, rainwater is moved from the roof area, to the ground. But then the water stays in the ground area, for a long time--as if it were a flat roof. It's a way to use a sloped roof, but catch and hold water on a flat yard.
The entire area is lined with pond liner and filled with sand. Sandy soil has spaces, allowing the water to wick upward (by capillary reaction) to plant roots. The finer the sand, the higher the water wicks upward.
All of the working components, like the liner and piping, are hidden under or behind the stone, steel and plants. Most people wouldn't know it's a rooftop garden, nor even that it's a mainly native garden, because of the orderly rows and columns of grasses. Edging was made out of sheets of steel cut into different heights. Corten 11 gauge steel rusts into a fuzzy brown, instead of staying silver, unifying the contemporary warm colors.
It's a sort of bog garden too, by the way the rainwater slowly moves through it. If the water didn't move, it might smell swampy. But with deep rooted plants and gravity moving excess water to drain out a low end, into a rain garden, this system cleans the water.
