Roofs
Roof gardens can seem exotic, their sky-high scenes best suited to tall, space-deprived cities like New York. Yet for those of us living in apartments in Los Angeles, or hilltop houses with vertical lots, or houses built out to the edge of a lot, the choice may be simple: You garden on your balcony or you don’t garden at all.
On the rooftops pictured here, trees bear fruit, water flows and vines flower. There is even a small turf lawn where people lie and count stars. Added lights create outdoor spots for dinner; shade cloth screens the afternoon sun. If the space is there, use it.
Of course, any structure must be strong enough to bear the weight of soil-filled pots, trellises, people and furniture, so it’s wise to consult an engineer before you start. Knowing where load-bearing beams are will help you place your containers appropriately. Using light soil (for example, half-compost, half-perlite) in fiberglass pots will reduce the weight. If you live in a condo or apartment building, you’ll probably need to show plans to the housing board or management. (No one wants a roof collapse or flooded neighbor.)
When you go to the nursery, choose sturdy, drought-tolerant plants that can take exposed, windy conditions. Place plants to accentuate pleasant views, block grim ones and, together with safety railings, create an edge that evokes security, not vertigo. Don’t overcrowd. Remember, you’ll have to lug everything--plants, containers and soil--upstairs and then maintain order, watering, clipping and feeding, on a regular basis. But the rewards are many. In place of a hot tar beach, you’ll have a cool garden in the air.
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Buddha’s balcony
Black bamboo, red flax and a giant Buddha head enclose this Beverly Hills balcony, which adjoins a condo with Asian-style interiors. The London-based film-director owner wanted a quiet garden he could use daily but leave at a moment’s notice. “Keep it simple,” he told L.A. landscape designer Paul Robbins, who extended the Asian theme outdoors with bamboo fencing, woven-resin chairs and a fountain, made from an antique rice-grinding wheel by Thomas Schoos Design of West Hollywood.
After consulting an architect for a structural assessment, Robbins went to Asian Ceramics in Pasadena for brown-glazed pots--”the biggest ones we could get in the lift and through the door,” he says. He arranged these on the periphery of the 18-by-20-foot deck. Building his plant palette around the tones and textures of the black bamboo, he added red fountain grass, equisetum, carex and papyrus, all of which rasp and rustle in the wind. To blot out an apartment building across the street, he trained summer-blooming pandorea vines on willow hoops along one fence. But he left the view open to the northeast, to take in borrowed local palms and eucalyptus and the distant line of the Hollywood Hills.
Pots are drip-watered every other day during the hot months and fed monthly with an organic mix of blood and bonemeal. “You have to feed pots more than you would plants in the ground since you water more and the food washes away,” he says. “But plants get very big very fast up here.”
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Garden Suite
When garden designers Pamela Berstler and Alex Stevens of L.A.-based Flower to the People expanded their West L.A. house eight years ago, they intended to cap their new ground-floor bedroom and kitchen with a second-story master suite. But the project dragged and their funds dwindled, and they decided instead to recoup some lost outdoor ground by turning that master into a roof garden. Eight-hundred feet square, with a covered dining room, a porch swing and a bubbling pot-pond full of goldfish, the terrace triples the couple’s indoor entertaining space. “It’s totally changed how we live in our house,” says Berstler. She and her husband Stevens so love the deck that they designed many of its furnishings, and now market them through their company, Pamalex Effects.
Over time, the two have played with the deck’s layout and plantings, moving furniture as they observe where party guests gather, and experimenting with vines, shrubs and trees to enhance their enclosure. Potted ficus, dodonaea and stephanotis vines block phone wires and neighbors’ roofs. Grouped containers--spilling succulents and gazanias--define seating spots. Low-voltage lights make the garden friendly at night, and shade cloth on the overhead trellis blocks 80% of the noon sun. Heavier elements, such as trees, are distributed in corners, where structural beams are, but drainage is the bigger issue. “If we had designed this initially as outdoor space, we would have put in more drains,” says Berstler. “After a major rain, we have to come up and sweep, or the terrace turns into a swimming pool.”
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A lofty lawn
The vision of a lawn for lounging inspired this Santa Monica condo deck, designed by Berstler and Stevens for a film producer/actor/director. Beginning with an empty 14-by-14-foot space off a third-floor media room, they built a frame, roughly the size of a queen-size bed, out of yellow cedar and ironwood, placed it over an existing drain and laid in a floor of perforated pressed-concrete board. On top of that went a weed barrier and then, to enhance drainage, an inch-and-a-half of pea gravel, an equivalent layer of coarse sand and a 2-inch soil-and-compost mix. An automatic turf-irrigation system waters sparingly twice a week, and the grass gets a weekly haircut with hedge shears. Three times a year, when her client is out of town, Berstler feeds the bed with fish emulsion. “People lie on it,” she explains. “You don’t want to add chemicals.”
Oriented toward a distant ocean view, the bed is screened from the street below with removable steel trellises draped with bougainvillea and cape honeysuckle. A “headboard” planter holds kumquats, which can be plucked and eaten from a prone position, and nearby, a podocarpus tree shades a dining table. “I’m always out here when I’m home,” says the owner, a part-time New Yorker. “I’ve had picnics on the bed and I’ve even slept out here all night.”
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City lights
Like a ship heading downtown, this Hollywood Hills roof commands a view from the ocean to Griffith Park. When the blinking night arrives, the owners can watch traffic on Sunset Boulevard become a stream of gold while a strand of fiber-optic light comes alive along the deck’s rim. As it shifts through a programmed display of colors--white, yellow, green, blue, electric pink--a second fiber-optic beam pulses at the center of a fountain, which in turn bubbles up through a glass-topped table poised above the view.
Created by landscape architect Pamela Palmer of the Venice-based firm Artecho, this 2,000-square-foot “sky garden” provides the largest outdoor living space for a three-story hilltop house. Sherman Oaks architectural designer Peymon Kooklanfar of Kook & Assoc. laid the groundwork, designing the wood deck and steel railings during a house remodel in the late ‘90s. To Palmer, hired in 2000, the railed platform evoked a ship’s prow, and she enhanced the aquatic illusion by planting the 3-foot-wide ledge beyond its rails with a froth of blue-gray westringia and Senecio mandraliscae.
Challenged to capitalize on the view while making the open deck more private, she added Greenscreen trellises in selected spots along the edge and planted them with trumpet vines. Within these, to delineate gathering areas and suggest the layered depths of a garden, she designed three sizes of planter box, had them custom made in lightweight fiberglass by Fiberglass Fabricators in Orange and filled them with tall dodonaea, sprawling loropetalum and smoky-blue euphorbia.
Finally, along with two custom-designed table fountains, she brought in citrus trees in wheeled containers, which can be rolled beside chairs for instant shade. Outdoor lighting expert John Gannon of San Pedro-based Gannon Electric Light conceived the subtle fiber-optic lights to add magic without stealing from the view.
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Resource guide
GARDENS, Pages 28-32: Pamela Berstler, Alex Stevens, Flower to the People, Inc., Los Angeles, (310) 312- 5076; Pamalex Effects, Los Angeles, (310) 312-5076; Pamela Palmer, Artecho Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Venice, (310) 399-4794; Peymon Kooklanfar, Kook & Associates, Sherman Oaks, (818) 907-6167; John Gannon, Gannon Electric Light, San Pedro, (310) 831-0189; Janus et Cie., West Hollywood, (310) 652-7090; Greenscreen, Los Angeles, (800) 450-3494; Fiberglass Fabricators, Orange, (714) 633-3731; Paul Robbins Garden Design, Inc., Los Angeles, (323) 461-3970; Thomas Schoos Design Inc., West Hollywood, (310) 854-1141; Asian Ceramics, Pasadena, (626) 449-6800.
