Roofs & Rambles

Finally catching up with myself went to Stuttgat, Ulm, Linz and Vienna in late may this year in big green roof tour.
In Paris where I changed trains saw a green wall next door to Gare du Nord. In Stuttgart visited a few green roofs of which my favourite was a meadow roof at podium level. Also saw the Die Post Centre which I have talked with Peter over the years. The only Die Post Centre with a green roof. It has the lowest sick rate in the whole organisation. Although there is no empirical data it would appear that as the ambient temperature is relatively even throughout the year the incidence of sickness is less. How to communicate these subtleties to accountants with columns as the only reference points!!!

The IGRA green roof conference Bringing Nature to the City was great.  It was good to network with a lot of people from southern Europe and to perhaps (I hope) to establish a
Mediterranean  group to discuss planting in southern Europe. This is an important output for Efb as we need get this going.

There were a some interesting and informative talks on policy initiatives, especially form Germany including Karlsruhe, Dusseldorf and Berlin. The other were ok but disappointed that most focused on intensive green roofs. Paul Kephart of rana creek did one of the only talks on extensive green roofs, which focused on his exemplary work at the Academy of Science in San Francisco.

Good to meet up with colleagues and friends such as Wolgang Ansel Manfred Kohler, Edmund Maurer and others including Christine, who was covering the event for Linda at greenroofs.com. You can read her review of the event at greenroof.com