My Old Rooftop - More Photos

Hah! Trying to get my photos organized have unearthed a few more photos of my old rooftop garden. Notice how over-exposed the photos were. This was how strong and bright the sunlight was, even in the morning. I estimate that this was taken around the 9-10am mark. No later than 10.30am.

My old Coral Tree (Erythrinia Fusca), grown in a pot, putting out new growth and flowers after a prune.

My huge Cycad (Cycas Revoluta) that was overshadowing the pond.  

The sitting area, seen through another palm (Pinanga Coronata). Yes, many good memories here.

My old staghorn (which was HUGE) and my wild and fern-filled tree fern stem, amidst a large draecana. 

This photo does not do the plants justice, and I have no idea why I took it the way I did, but surely there must be a better photo of them somewhere... Ah... to have all my photos unearthed from nooks and crannies, and organized!!! I miss the tree fern stem. Someone gave it to me in early 2000, and my hubby thought I was nuts taking this dead, dirty stem ("rotting" he said) AND hanging it on our roof. I had wanted to tie some ferns on it to make the tree fern stem a literal fern tree, but life has a habit of occupying our time... 6 months later, mother nature had decided to colonize it. Lo and behold! A living fern tree! I counted at least 5-6 different types of ferns, but from this angle you can only see one. Two, if you do an extreme magnification of the photo. Since we were staying very close to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, mother nature had probably sent me some spores from there :-)

My palms (Veitchia Merrillii) on the roof, enjoying the sun. Also notice my favourite ponytail plant (Beaucarnea recurvata) [bottom right, second plant]. 

I bought my ponytail plant as a really tiny plant from Ikea (you know, the type they sell in almost thumb-sized pots? Ok, I exaggerate). That was probably around 1998, give or take a year. This roof photo was taken in 2004, which makes it roughly 6 years old. I still have the plant, which has aged well, and is still growing! Since it is one of my favourite plants that has stayed with me through the years, I'll take an updated photo of it one of these days, and give it a separate post.

My Old Rooftop - A Nightly Magical Wonderland

I love my old rooftop, especially at night. Cool and windy on most nights, it played host to our BBQs, drinks nights, the occasional family dinners... Mid-Autumn Mooncake Festival was great, because us adults and kids alike would sit around, lighting endless lanterns and placing them all over the place, creating a really wonderful fairyland effect. But even without the lanterns, the garden was magical. Christmas of course was even better...

And with these memories, I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

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...

My Old Rooftop - I miss it

I know I've a larger house, a "real" garden, and a much larger pond now (and I really love it here)... but I was sorting through old photos, and looking at my previous penthouse rooftop garden, realized how much I miss it.

Ok, it was unbearably hot from 10am through to 6pm, but it was wonderfully cool and fresh in the mornings (my place used to be near the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve), and cool and windy in the evenings after sunset. Sometimes, if we have a party and stay up there till the wee hours of the morning, it was chilly even.

The view was lovely, and uncluttered, and somehow, even though the space really wasn't that large, the fact that the view stretched out with no immediate walls or buildings at eye level made it seem that much larger, that much more spacious:

I love the sink that I'd designed for the outdoor space, and maybe one day, for a new project in my garden, I'd build another like it.  For now, memory and photos will have to do:

Note the sink itself. It's nothing more than a glazed pot!

Here on the right of this photo, is my old "ready-made" pond. It was with this pond that I'd refined my DIY pond skills to the extent that I can design, build and maintain my current large outdoor pond. This includes experimenting in water pump, water flow and (very low maintenance) biological and mechanical filters. Anyways, just to give you an idea, even though this is an outdoor pond with direct sunlight, I only have to clean out the filter twice a year, and suck out stuff from the bottom of the pond once a year. Water was crystal clear throughout. It's a pity that somehow, in my photo-taking, I seem to have omitted taking a direct photo of the pond. Sigh. It was a nice little pond...

Bye, bye, old rooftop...