Today, while working out in the orchard, I looked up towards our house and noticed a flash of pink on the roof.

We have an earth roof. In an earth roof system, the roof is waterproofed, insulated, and then covered in soil and plants. There are many benefits, two of our favourites being fire protection (bushfire is a very real threat here) and longevity (other roofs deteriorate, but from what we have read, earth roofs protect the underlying structures from ultraviolet rays, meaning our roof should be around for a long time.).

That said, our earth roof system is not ideal and is a bit of an experiment. It is recommended that a living roof has a minimum of 100mm of soil on the roof to support plant life, but our engineer only approved us for 20mm of soil.  Boo.

There are undoubtedly plants which exist on little to no soil, but we are not experts on this matter. We decided to take a two-pronged approach; we would hope that suitable seeds would be carried by birds and the wind and naturally colonise on the roof, and we also planted pieces of a native succulent groundcover Carpobrotus rossii, commonly known as pigface. Pigface is a hardy coastal plant found on sand dunes in Tasmania, and we figured that anything that grows in sand might just survive on our roof.

The pigface has been on our roof for less than a year; this will be its first summer and the real test as to whether it will survive. Up until now, the pigface has done very little; we hoped it would spread all over the roof in just a season, but it seemed to be doing little more that just surviving.

Then, today, that flash of pink.

I climbed onto the roof to investigate.

The pieces of pigface are in flower.

It is a harsh landscape up there. In many places, the soil has eroded away completely. (It really needs for the whole roof to be covered in plants to protect the soil from the wind, but of course, the plants need time to establish…)

These flowers give me hope. They have proven they are worthy of my help. To repay their gutsiness, I will take more soil to the roof, a truckload more pigface, and maybe even some kind of mulch to give it all a better chance of establishing.  Maybe our stingy amount of soil can support life. Maybe one day our roof will be a glorious garden to behold. To be continued…