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Building a green roof is all very well, but what happens next? If the answer isn’t “amazeballs stewardship,” then you’re doing something wrong.

Much of our collective cultural focus on green roofs has to do with “getting one.” As though simply installing a roof is enough to win you the Medal of Ongoing Environmental Awesomeness for All Time.

No, that’s not a real thing.

Yes, some people act like it is.

Truthfully, though, while it’s fantastic to build green roofs, it’s not enough to simply do so, dust off your hands and walk away.

The same goes for any other type of green infrastructure: bioswale, rain collection system, low-water landscape, rooftop garden, or what have you. These systems are tightly structured to achieve specific goals, and they often exist in harsh environments. They need careful stewarding, or they won’t achieve those goals and they will suffer.

Careful stewardship of your green roof means frequent site inspections to ensure its health and stability, but how often should they occur?

If you build it … they will come. “They” being the birds, butterflies, insects and other fauna that inhabit green roofs across our fair cities.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Green roofs need careful balancing. A green roof's purpose is to mimic nature in a very condensed profile. You have deep soil profiles in nature, around 2 feet on average, but we’re asking the same type of natural habitat to perform in only 6 inches, and often less. That's a big ask.

In other words, they need our help maintaining balance. While an established green roof does settle into a low-maintenance equilibrium, there’s no such thing as a no-maintenance system, no matter what some green roofers will tell you beforehand.

Just ask anyone who’s ever dropped tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a project, then let it “take care of itself” for a few years.

Spoiler alert: It won’t. Which is where green roof site inspections come in.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last decade – and a very remote rock at that – you’ve heard the word pollinator.

Most likely you even know that the term extends far beyond bees, encompassing birds, bats, moths, beetles and tons of other insects. Nevertheless, bees make up a huge portion of the pollinating pie, and since they fly, they are frequent visitors of green roofs and roof top gardens.

Where, can we just say, they do a lot of kickass work. But what type of work, exactly? And how do those green roofs help them back?

That’s what we’re here to talk about today. Get ready for the greatest romance of all time: pollinators and the green roofs that love them.

Stewardship is a critical factor in getting the most out of your green system, whether your goal is beauty or environmental benefits or both. Here’s how to get peak performance.

You have a green roof, or perhaps another green system. Whether it was recently installed or is 10 years old, you want it to work well.

Ideally, you want it to work very well. Year-round peak performance is the goal.

(One assumes. Let’s just go with it.)

But how do you accomplish that? In other words, what are the basic tasks involved in stewarding a green roof environment?

Glad you asked. Here’s a basic rundown of how you should steward your green system – whether a rooftop garden, bioswale or another kind of green infrastructure – all year round.

Sustainability is a buzzword we hear a lot, but do we truly understand what’s needed to preserve the health of urban and rural areas? Our interview with Keith Bowers provides a look at how we can move beyond a simple idea of sustainability, toward a truly rich ecology across our nation and the globe. 

(Download a PDF version of the report to share with friends and colleagues for free)

Since our earliest days, we have felt a divide between human habitation and the Wild – a vast unknown that, for much of human history, was populated with monsters and nightmares too frightening to comprehend.

We create light where once was darkness, water where formerly the desert reigned, high walls where saber-toothed cats stalked at will. Our singular goal has been to fulfill an evolutionary mandate to keep our own species safe at all costs, even if that means railroading the other organisms with whom we share this planet and destroying the resources upon which they depend.

Today, we’re waking up to the fact that … come to think of it … we depend on those resources too, and it would be a real bummer if they were gone by our children’s or grandchildren’s generation. Even without such a strong motivator, preserving the Earth for its other inhabitants is, we can agree, the right thing to do.

Luckily for the rest of the human race, some forward thinkers spotted this issue years back. They have spent decades fighting against the negative impacts of profligacy and shortsighted development trends, and setting better ones in place.

Ecology has proven one of the most fruitful of these fields. Its sturdy relationship with other buzzwords – sustainability, resiliency, environmentalism – points to its importance, yet others might say it confuses the issue as well.

Keith Bowers is one of the latter.

While we assume the color green automatically indicates environmental aid, that’s not necessarily the truth. We need better metrics for telling between what is green and what merely looks it.

People tend to simplify:

Cake = delicious. Vegetables = gross.

Yet caramelized onions are amazing, and banana cake is an absolute crime against humanity. So clearly oversimplification is a problem from which we humans tend to suffer.

The same holds true in the green-iverse.

Let’s face it: We’re just suckers for the color green. Show us a succulent-clad green roof and we’re going to believe the best in it, even if it doesn’t necessarily add to the surrounding environment in any meaningful way.

On the other hand, we assume a bare patch of ground is worthless – even though a completely dead green roof still performs about 60 percent of the stormwater management services of its fully functional, vibrant counterparts.

So if we can’t trust the color green to provide automatic indication of environmentalism, what can we know? What do we look for?

Here’s a brief primer on separating the wheat from the chaff.

Pollinators matter in cities as well as agricultural areas, but numbers and diversity of these critical animals are in constant decline. It’s time we address the issue.

You can’t get an honest bite of street falafel these days without experiencing the oh-so-popular lament for the sacred honeybee.

On television and magazine covers, over the radio and via interviews galore, we hear more and more about declining bee populations. And that does matter, but what all those interviews fail to take into account is the importance of other pollinators too.

Declining pollinator diversity is, in fact, a serious problem these days. Not just honeybees, but native bees, beetles, butterflies, moths, birds and even bats struggle from loss of forage and shelter.

It’s not enough that we fight back for the honeybee, although that’s important too. We need to work to increase the number and kinds of other pollinators as well.

But how can we foster pollinator diversity in both urban and agricultural areas? How can we prop up urban ecology before it’s too late?

Let’s take a look at the most promising approaches today.

Green roofs are pretty, and we all know they’re “good” for the world, but what does that really mean? Here’s a look at the bottom-line benefits of ecological systems.

Would you get a great haircut and then call it good for life?

Can you make an awesome brunch then never eat again?

Do you pop out a baby, dust off your hands and say, “Good luck in college, kid!”

Of course not, because hair, tummies and children all take serious maintenance over time.

Well, the same goes for maintaining green roofs. Why should we assume that putting one in, reaping those tax credits and walking away will result in solid benefits over time?

Spoiler alert: that kind of approach doesn’t work at all. In fact, without routine stewardship – working with the ecological system to ensure it gets the care it needs, when it needs it – you will quickly lose those bennies.

No one wants that, and yet, taking care of a green roof does cost time and money, so you need a good reason to do so, right?

Here are three.

We tend to forget about our green roofs once they’re built, but it turns out stewardship and public health are strongly related. Translation: It’s crucial to maintain green systems over time.

While stewardship and public health might not be a relationship you’ve spent a lot of time considering until now, it’s time to break that trend.

Green roofs get a lot of praise for managing stormwater and providing animal habitat (though perhaps not as much credit as they should get), but we don’t spend a lot of time talking about how they benefit human health.

Well, they do. And that’s what we’re here to discuss today.

Stewardship, a partnership between a green roofer and its caretakers intended to keep it viable long into the future, is critical if we don’t want ecological design to fail.

We hear a lot about green roof maintenance.

The word gets tossed around in landscape architecture and ecological design, the clear implication that as long as you attend to a system in some way, it will do just fine.

However, the assumption underlying the concept of maintenance – that you can take the same cookie-cutter approach on a twice-yearly basis to each green roof – fails to consider one important truth:

No two green roofs are alike.

If you haul the same bucket of supplies up every time, without testing and inspecting plants and components, then eventually you will miss problems. First little ones, and then big.

Maintenance, in other words, is not enough.