A new Jersey roof garden with a skyline view

Flower & Garden Magazine, Sept-Oct, 1997 by William John Wallis

Ever since youth, I have maintained some sort of garden; I find the pastime to be a great stress reliever and the results very rewarding. In New York City I fought the odds on a paved, dark space behind a walk-up tenement for years. In 1981 I moved into a 22-story apartment building that was constructed in the late 60s on the New Jersey Palisades. Its spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson River had drawn me out of New York. Soon after that I asked the manager for permission to garden in the former dog run, an area of open lawn surrounded by large Austrian pines and a few shrubs. Management often welcomes free maintenance of an unused space.

THis area is a concrete tray with 3 feet of soil over the roof of a four-level parking garage that juts out over the edge of the granite cliffs. I was off and running, on a small scale at first, but as my plants grew, so did my domain. All I needed to grow a wide variety of plants was sun, water and heavy fertilization.

The building, known as Troy Towers, was converted from a rental to a cooperative in 1982. Among the improvements was the removal of the Austrian pines along the northern border because they blocked the view of a ground-floor restaurant. This change opened up a large area for new plantings and removed the only garden element that had created shade.

I made my move, quickly installing a windbreak of arborvitae on the north side, which suffered from gale-force winds. We also planted several sapling deciduous trees: a Camperdown elm, a `Bloodgood' Japanese maple and three `Amanogawa' cherries, a vertical tree that does not block important views but creates a glorious spring show. All existing shrubs were eventually removed; over the years they had assumed gumdrop and haybale shapes.

The garden became a success. I was asked to form a landscape committee to review the condition of the remaining building grounds. Of course there were objections from some of our more negative neighbors: "Why bother?" "Things will get vandalized or stolen."

We went forward, however, and drew up a large plan of the grounds and published notices asking for volunteers to help in the planting. People responded. Individuals and entire families came out to help. We scheduled our planting to coincide with spring -- the time just before our swimming pool opened, when we knew we would lose all our help.

For the next two years, we upgraded the grounds of the building. A circular fountain in front of the building received a new edging of low holly hedges, and a half dozen Callery pears and ivy groundcover replaced the high maintenance lawn areas. The cost was minimal but the rewards were overwhelming in terms of bringing people together in the sun after a long winter indoors.

As time went by, the remaining Austrian pines had begun to block the skyline views, so they were removed. We replaced them with Japanese black pines, white firs, gold-tipped deodar cedars, Swiss stone pines and a mixture of flowering shrubs -- hydrangeas, burning bushes, viburnums and azaleas. Redbud, dawn redwood and crabapple trees accent the garden design.

The garden has several peak bloom periods. It shakes off its winter doldrums when the `Amanogawa' cherries unfold their delicate, double, pale pink flowers along with the redbud and crabapple, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths and pansies. As the tulips fade away, they are replaced with annuals -- impatiens, salvia, petunias, marigolds, portulaca, cleome and sunflowers, bedded out each year in a different manner. The true peak of the perennials arrives the first week in June when Siberian and bearded irises, peonies, Oriental poppies, climbing roses and clematis dominate the grounds. Sunny coreopsis, daylilies, early hybrid lilies and a mix of other minor perennials follow.

Late July brings another big show of late daylilies, yucca, lythrum and black-eyed Susan, accented by a wide variety of ornamental grasses that have by now become very lush. The annuals carry the show through August. The final curtain arrives in September with color from chrysanthemums, sedum, flowering kale and cabbage and the graceful movement of grass seedheads in the autumn breezes. Only the grasses stand sentinel through the winter, kept company by a few scattered evergreens and yuccas until the last snow melts and the ground again surges with spring growth.

Unlike most residential gardens, ours is seen by people living in over 90 percent of the building. People use and enjoy this garden. Springtime brings out parents with babies, older kids playing ball, teenagers lolling on the grass and chatting amongst themselves, and elderly residents relaxing and reading on benches. For urban dwellers, this garden is their only contact with nature.

There never was a formal plan for the garden, although I am a garden designer. The garden really works as a test plot, helping me to select hardy plants for residential and commerical landscaping projects; anything that will survive in this difficult exposure has to be tough enough for most job sites. Although clients are often quite selective about flower types and colors, I am not and tend to include just about anything that will tolerate the exposure. The result is an ever-changing, wild and wonderful melange of color and shape overlooking the concrete forest of midtown Manhattan.