Brooklyn Roof Garden Black thumbs tilling a tar beach

A guy on the roof next door shouted: “Nice plants. What’s your secret?”

“You have to water every day,” RP boomed back.

Yes, you totally need to water a roof garden every day in these hottest days. Even when it rains, we try to check and make sure all the pots got wet — remembering not to over-water the fussy geraniums.

Besides watering, we we do have one other way to keep our gardening going in the heat: succulents! Sempervivum (hens ‘n chicks), Portulaca grandiflora (moss rose) like a dry heat, so we sure have a spot for them right between our two Adirondack chairs on a small table right in the sun. I am surprised how few NYC gardeners plant sepmervivum and portulaca. Maybe that’s because these plants don’t look very fun in the garden center, when compared to annuals already in bloom.

Most of our plants are in plastic pots, which help to retain moisture, but we grow our succulents in low terra cotta bowls. This gives them the drainage they need and lets us highlight them on the tops of tables.

Last summer, my succulents sucked. This year I am having more luck. I figured out I could use portulaca, a faster growing annual, to fill in around my sempervivums (Hard-core gardening types call them “semps.”) The portulaca flowers add color too, but the flowers are only open during the day, so we don’t get to see them too often.

It’s time to talk about Garden Lady. She plants ground cover in other people’s tree pits. She pounces off her stoop down the street to rescue mostly dead plants from trash cans. And she loves forwarding deals on bone meal to the block association email list. She wouldn’t give me any of the block association’s daffodil bulbs because she felt I didn’t dig deep enough trenches in our tree pit.

In early June, I caught Garden Lady kneeling in front of our tree pits. All day I wondered what she was up to. I was surprised when I got home that night and didn’t notice anything different in our tree pits. I couldn’t figure out what she did. Duh! Garden Lady slipped some seeds in there. Now we have morning glory vines climbing up the tree pit cage. They haven’t flowered yet. I’ve had to snap off some of their tendrils in valiant defense of my purple petunias and Autumn Joy sedum.

I was re-considering Garden Lady’s crimes this morning when I passed these morning glories and Black eyed Susan vines (Thunbergia) down the street. I wonder if Garden Lady planted these too? The Morning Glory stands for “love in vain” and is the flower for 11th anniversaries. I’m not so good on dates, but weirdly  I think this is my 11th summer in my apartment.

All of Garden Lady’s crimes seem so banal now, but at the time I was really ticked. July’s calmed my tree pit turf war. Now we’re hand-watering the tree pits almost every night and I’ve started rooting for her morning glories to bloom. All along it was the Tree Branch Breaker I should have been looking out for.

This is the gardening equivalent of guys leaving the brand name tags on their suit jacket sleeves.

This tiny juniper is going all Minnie Pearl on us.

Thanks to Penelope Green for her honest, gracious look at New York City’s roof gardens in today’s New York Times. She doesn’t go gaga high-end gardens tended by a staff. Photographer Tony Cenicola doesn’t completely crop away the rough edges of roof gardens: rusting ventilation systems, mis-matched pots, and chain link fences. Instead, the Time’s celebrates the highs and lows of four “doughty survivors.” (I didn’t know the definition of ‘doughty’ and had to look it up. It means “marked by fearless resolution,” “like a warrior”).

The article ends with a look at Michael Goldstein’s extraordinary Soho garden. I visited there last summer and posted photos here.
Image: NY Times