My Saturday afternoon closed with an eight point list of things I needed to address on a collaborative project I’m participating in:

1.       Concrete solutions

2.       Final Juniper selection

3.       Reconsider screening

4.       Develop “second garden space”

5.       Move Smokebush

6.       Acquire sandstone cobbles

7.       Shrub alternatives

8.       Write 100 word description of Buffalo Horticulture for media release

The final one has me reeling.

Our late afternoon meeting followed six days in the field repairing snow damaged turf at a thirty acre distribution facility in Cheektowoga. Massive piles of snow left several 5000 square foot sections of turf suffocated and dead and many other areas rutted up from tires and gouged and torn from snowplows. I like to share my work through social media – which is new, but exciting for me as my work has always been enclosed in a backyard or identified with someone else’s name, Buffalo Horticulture having been “subcontracted.” So to post an image of my day, a paragraph of something I’m researching or trying to solve, or to share the range of places and projects I’m involved in make me feel less isolated in the intensity of my work. But here, all of a sudden, working at the warehouse, I couldn’t find a way via blog or Facebook to show “turf repair” in an exciting manner.  The best I could do was Tweet an image of my truck one foggy morning. How do “I” show up in such a simple project. The “I” that always seems to be working on visual and design – how is it reconciled with smoothing topsoil?

Almost exclusively, for six days, I worked along the edges of parking areas and roadways with my “Jackson True Temper, 16 tine bow-rake.” It was the rake we used for grading when I was a kid, but somewhere along the way it disappeared. My earliest responsibility growing up in the business was to inventory the tool bins, make sure each crew had a specific set of tools, and what was missing or damaged needed to be replaced. This would happen each spring around the end of March as we prepared for the upcoming season. After sorting and listing, I was sent to “Land-o-Trees” which was at the corner of Dick Road and Wherle Drive in Cheektowoga – one of the original garden centers in WNY – and I would buy our tools there. I really knew nothing else, but they had every tool we used. But, “Land-O-Trees” closed in the mid-nineties and I believe ever since then the tools have come from Home Depot. And so, ever since then, the 16-tine bow-rake has disappeared.

                A few years ago, I was grading a lawn in the back of the renovated “257 Lafayette” (the old elementary school of the Catholic Annunciation Church) and I wrote this short journal entry about grading – tractors and rakes. How, here I was trying to install this lawn, only, now there were only skidsteers with hydraulic grading implements and hiring or renting a conventional tractor was near impossible. Also, working with a crew of four that day, I couldn’t help watch everyone grade, watch their rakes move, their techniques – and notice that no one had ever used a bow-rake before. Everyone was trying to rake out soil with “stone-rakes” which is now the ‘commercial grade’ rake Home Depot carries.

Somehow, last year I found that “Jackson” and “Ames Tools” were still making 16-tine bow-rakes and I was able to order one online for only $28. I was very excited and didn’t want anything to happen to it. I explained to the crew that I had special ordered this rake and that once-upon-a-time I used it when I was a kid. “Please be careful with it.” Amazingly I somehow went through most of last year never doing any grading. It’s just how it goes. Horticulture is a wide ranging field. So, when I arrived at this distribution center to do all this turf repair to open the season, while there were no brilliant images to excite you with, nothing to catch your eye, nothing to suggest Buffalo Horticulture’s design prowess or gardening savvy – there was this simple rake I was using everyday, wood handle, cast iron 16 tine head. It comes in blue or red. I chose blue.

Green roofs. Who is the expert you can call in? It is a roof, so you call a roofer? But, its a landscape project? Or, is it 'green infrastructure?" Or, a wildlife habitat?

I don't believe we have arrived yet - in Buffalo, NY - where there is really an isolated field or area of expertise, specializing in the green roof. My approach or belief is that the green roof is necessarily a collaborative project - we may look to the following specialties as needing representation in the process of project development and that there is no "ONE" authority or expert. 

1. Architect/Designer. Someone needs to lead with the vision, ideas, and to facilitate the collaborative process. I would suggest part of the skill and expertise deployed here would be the ability to have conversations at many different levels and to speak a range of technical languages.

2. Engineer. The first thing I need to determine in the assessment of a potential green roof site is "what and how much can be put on a roof." An understanding of how loads are distributed and how a building is structured can tell us what is a safe. It is possible your building can't bear anymore weight.

3. Roofer. Due to the investment of the "green" placed above the roof, we need to be sure the layers beneath the horticultural elements are sealed up good and leak free. Green roofs can double the life of a roof, but to find leaks and make repairs can be more difficult. I turn this part of the project over to someone who has way more experience and knowledge than I.

4. Horticulturist. While I may act as the designer who is pulling the entire project together, my real expertise is in making the plants grow. Cultivating in minimal, lightweight, and artificial growing mediums used on green roofs is about as extreme a condition as you can try to produce a garden in. This is not a task for the roofer as much as roofing is not a task for me.

My concern is that right now those clamoring to construct green roofs are not collaborations of experts but "green enthusiasts." And, while I am a "green enthusiast," what I'm pointing towards is the phenomena which has developed over the past fifteen years of "experts" who come to be because of "Google," as, now, we all can become knowledgeable of any number of things in twenty minutes of research. 

While there are some out there claiming expertise, it needs to be considered what kind of experience this expertise comes from. Buffalo has a lot of skilled people out there looking for the opportunity to produce something special - there are no shortage of them. We just want to use caution that we pull as many of these people together in collaboration when developing sites, structures, roofs, neighborhoods, and landscapes - always with skills, materials, climates, economies, and ways of being unique to Buffalo, NY. There is never a universal way to produce something - and I think with Green Roofs in Buffalo, we are still, together, figuring them out.