An Urban Rooftop Garden for Pollinators

Each morning my partner, Steve, and I head up to our rooftop to greet the bees as they begin their days’ work. After all, time is honey. While I sometimes struggle to spend 15 minutes saying my morning hello before heading off to work, the pollinators are always up there, rain or shine, all day and all night, whether we’re up there enjoying our garden or not. Ultimately, that’s why we opted to design our outdoor space with a larger ecological agenda in mind.

After all, time is honey.

The only thing that made purchasing our Chicago condo more appealing than the rooftop was the inspection note that the rooftop deck was rotting and would need to be replaced. Steve and I both went to school for architecture, so the opportunity to redesign anything was a welcome invitation. For the first growing season, we enjoyed the rotting decking with our plastic pots, scraps of paper covered in sketches, and a few cocktails while formulating the new design. While my initial inclinations toward the space were more austere and heavy on foliage, I couldn’t help but notice the number of pollinators that showed up to our little collection of containerized plants no matter what time of day we were on the roof. I realized that although my potted exploratory perennials were just a block away from Chicago’s Lincoln Park, they were providing much more than the mown lawns and mulch circles nearby. That led me to decide that the plant palette would not be a color scheme, but food, housing, and a safe space. My preference for clean, muted colors would find its moment as a contrast in hardscape and furniture choices. I changed my design thinking, rewrote the narrative of how the space would be used, and spent the winter refining the plan before our