Phila. firm's green roofs offer ecological heads-up

DeSarae Woodall - FreshVoice
It’s a bright shiny day under a clear blue sky, and Jane Winkel, landscape architect and marketing director of the Mount Airy company Roofscapes Inc., is standing in the middle of a garden – four stories up.

The colorful landscape of fleshy green, purple and yellow plants called sedum is a “green roof” that Winkel’s company installed last summer atop the Friends Center, 15th and Cherry streets, in Center City. It’s one of 103 green roofs that Roofscapes has designed – making the local company one of the national leaders in the green-building industry.

Indeed, the company’s founder, Charlie Miller, who lives in Mount Airy , is “considered one of the grandfathers of green roofs in the U.S.,” Winkel said. This summer, Entrepreneur magazine recognized the Philly company as one of “100 brilliant ideas” in the business world today.

Cities around the world are starting to require green roofs on new buildings because they can help the environment in several ways. The most important benefit for urban areas in the northeastern U.S. is that the plants on green roofs capture rainwater, keeping it from overflowing sewers and sewage-treatment facilities, Winkel said. Green roofs can absorb 60 percent of the rain that falls on them.

Also, green roofs keep the temperature down on the roof – and in the city around it. They also help insulate a building, keeping it cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than a regular roof would.

Beyond those technical feats, “I think there’s great poetry in the idea of putting a green roof on a building that was once an ugly tar roof and is now a landscape,” Winkel said. Green roofs are installed in layers. At the bottom is a moisture barrier and a layer of material to keep the plants’ roots from growing into the building below. Over that is what’s called a growing medium (dirt) for the plants, made of ash with some fertilizer and weed killer mixed in.

The sedum plants growing on the Friends Center roof were planted last year as 1-inch “plugs.”

Erick Emerick, an administrative assistant at the center who gave UJW a tour of the building’s many innovative green features (see sidebar below), said that, at first, “it sort of looked like hair plugs,” but that the sedums are now nearing maturity.

Being succulent plants (they’re relatives of the cactus), the sedums on a green roof never need watering. Because they grow to only about 6 inches tall, they never need mowing, either, although a green roof does require occasional weeding.

Despite the economy, the green-roofing industry grew 38 percent last year. Roofscapes Inc. has seven employees and is on track to earn nearly $1 million next year. Roofscapes’ most famous green roof is on Chicago’s City Hall, recently featured in National Geographic. Its largest green roof, also in Chicago, is a 72,730-foot garden atop a Wal-Mart.

Locally, the Peco Energy skyscraper is another Philly building with a green roof from Roofscapes Inc. Winkel said that the Germantown Friends School and La Salle University’s Holroyd Hall are next in line.