Intensive Green Roofs

Intensive Green Roof, Garden Roof, Roof Garden - An intensive green roof system is characterized by its variety of vegetation ranging from herbaceous plants to small trees with professionel maintenance and advanced green roof irrigation systems.  A typical growing medium depth of an intensive green roof is 6 inches or more.  Intensive green roofs offer a great potential for design and biodiversity.  This system supports everything from small personal/home gardens to full scale public parks.  Plant selection and design greatly affects the maintenance required for the upkeep of these roofs. Rooftop farms, urban roof farms or vegetable farms on roofs are clearly intensive green roofs and require higher nutrient applications and focused maintenance.

Examples of Intensive Green Roofs

Cruise Ships

While the green roof on the cruise ship may only have a 5 inch profile, the irrigation and work involved in maintaining the warm and cold season grass lawn to pristine standards earns it the classification of an intensive green roof system.  The green roof features a 1 inch drainage layer with 4 inches of growing medium and specially selected sod mats.  Subsurface irrigation and a 24 hour computerized monitoring system ensures these lawns stay luxuriously lush for guests to enjoy whether they are sailing in St. Petersburg, Russia or the Caribbean.  Click here to see a video on these lawn club green roofs.

Peggy Notebeart Museum

The Peggy Notebeart Museum features a series of green roofs ranging from a sloped extensive green roof to an intensive green roof.  The intensive portion, features a 2-10 inch drainage layer and a 2.5 to 8 inch growing media layer, exhibits diverse examples of habitats.  The incredible set up of this green roof supports flora ranging from wetland plants to small trees.

Chicago City Hall

The Chicago City Hall green roof profile ranges from 4 inches to 2 feet in depth on a Geofoam landscape.  This roof amply supports over 150 plant species, including woody shrubs, vines and trees.  The plants were selected for their hardiness, native origins and their hardiness to the extreme temperatures and wind of the city by Landscape architects. Jörg Breuning consulted this project in all regards and developed Green Roof solution tailored for this unique location - and the first green roof in the USA according modern green roof technology.