By Lucille Chi •
May 3, 2009
Inhabitat shares a great set of stories on Alive Structures: a Brooklyn based green roofing collective. Together, with the most creative native gardeners in the city, Alive Structures will be giving tours of their rooftop gardens at NYC wildflower week. All those in the greater New York area make sure to stop by to explore this exciting dimension of the greening of cities.
City roof gardens create a nice natural habitat for pollinators and migrating species, and additionally “they provide open green spaces for property owners and the public to enjoy.” Green roofs are known to improve air and water quality, lessen storm-water runoff, lower building energy consumption, and reduce urban heat island affect.
Green roofs are constructed as a series of layers including:
- a waterproof membrane
- a root barrier
- drainage mat
- an erosion control fabric
- lightweight engineered soil, and vegetation.
By Lucille Chi •
April 22, 2009
Today, while walking with my dear friend after an uplifting yoga class, we were lured into a Lush shop (by the colorful poster above) to plant a seed bomb any place in the city that needs native wildflowers!
It gets even more adorable:
The Lush crew is set to do good across North America to see customers “dig in some soil, plant a few seeds, or mend a sagging fence. One good deed inspires anothor” ~ Guerilla Gardener, David Tracey
Climate change could mean the Rockies will see fewer wildflowers blooming in years to come, according to a University of Maryland researcher. More disturbing still: the decline in flowers could have repercussions for other creatures higher up the food chain, including grasshoppers, deer and elk.
Sifting through 35 years of data, David Inouye found that snow has been melting earlier in the Rockies over the past decade, causing three types of perennial wildflowers — larkspur, Aspen fleabane and Aspen sunflower — to start blooming earlier in the spring. While average temperatures are warming, the region is still prone to snaps of frost as late as June. The frost doesn’t kill the plants, but does leave them unable to bloom for the rest of the year. And that means the plants can’t produce seeds and reproduce.
