Plant a rooftop; change your life. That's Pamela Berstler's mission. By converting traditional heat-generating roofs into energy-saving ecosystems where succulents and wildflowers flourish, the West Los Angeles landscape designer hopes to transform the local landscape, one green roof at a time.
"It's easy to treat this as a fad, or a trend, but this is what our future looks like," Berstler says. Partnered with her husband, Alex Stevens, in Flower to the People, Berstler designs green roofs for residential clients. She believes homeowners should emulate the green building industry and plant eco-friendly rooftops that absorb and filter storm water, cool or insulate their surroundings and put oxygen back into the atmosphere.
"Green roofs are artful, but they should also be part of a water-management system in the landscape," she says. And among its many benefits, an energy-efficient "living roof" can be beautiful to look at.
Planted roofs are widely used in Europe and even in some American cities such as Chicago, which has spent the last decade encouraging commercial and residential homeowners to mitigate high energy costs with green roofs. Pasadena recently included green roofs in its mandatory green building policies for new municipal buildings.
But most residential rooftops here are still sheltered by such traditional materials as tile, shingles and composite sheeting. Homeowners haven't joined the green roof revolution, in part because of structural logistics and expense, experts say.
"The bottom line is that green roofs can make Los Angeles a much better, more livable city," says Steven Peck, founder and president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a Toronto-based nonprofit membership association for the green roof industry. "But we're not talking about a technology where you can go to Home Depot and do it yourself."
After reading about green roofs in a home design magazine, Susan Jenkins and Rene Maza of Altadena wanted to convert an ordinary patio roof into a planted garden-in-the-sky. "But it's not possible for individuals to do it by themselves," says Jenkins, director of exhibition management at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. "We needed both a building contractor and a landscape contractor."
