My Old Rooftop - The Forgotten Difficulties

However, despite all my reminiscing in my previous post, there are clear limitations to a rooftop garden, especially if it's right on top of a building. 

Firstly, it is mostly container gardening. This is fine if the pots are small and manageable, and the plants do not suffer too much from being pot constrained. After 5 years of rooftop gardening and transplanting, there is only that big a pot you can buy, and more importantly, that much strength you have to pull root-bound not-so-mini-trees from pots that are larger than the circumference of your arms put together. 

Secondly, with full day sun on most parts of the roof plus the accompanying wind (leading to hot and dry conditions) and in an extreme opposite, the full force of a tropical monsoon storm (leading to very wet conditions) the requirement for fertilizing and ironically, water is higher than most gardens. And if you provide good fertilizing and water, the plants grow that much faster with all that sun. And the repotting frequency increases that much more. Towards the end of that 5 years, I was repotting different sections of my roof every alternate weekend. By the time I finished repotting all the plants, It was time to repot again from the first section...

Lastly, if one is unable to repot, due to the limitation of size of container, or even the part of the rooftop where it was designed for direct planting, you can see the palms suffering from inadequate soil in the photo below. I even had a potted Coral Tree that each time I repot, would flower beautifully and grow new branches and leaves, but ultimately ended up looking rather sad and stunted, after it grew beyond a size that I could manage in pots. I know, I know, there are plants that do not grow that big etc etc, but unfortunately, I like tropical lush more than the spindly Aussie semi-desert look, or the Zen architectural more-stones-than-plants minimalist look. Ok, I'm biased, I admit it. I do appreciate them styles, really I do. I can even say they are beautiful in their own special way, but my garden should be lush. Lush, lush, lush...