Six ways to make your rooftops and balcony gardens green and beautiful

Be it 300sq ft or 10, space isn’t a constraint to make your home green. All you need is love. In Bangalore, Delhi and Pune, home-owners, architects and green evangelists share ideas on turning rooftops and balcony gardens into islands of green.

Black gold in your dustbin: Organic waste can be used to make compost, which is excellent manure for your plants since it’s a combination of multiple nutrients.

Hanging Gardens: Owners Manjiri Mahajan and Sameer Duraphe of SAMA Landscape Architects have their office on the fifth floor in Baner, Pune with little green cover. Their 300 sq ft balcony space was almost doubled by installing an 8-ft green pergola

Primary Colours: My Sunny Balcony (MSB) is a team of young enthusiasts in Bangalore, who customise home gardens in the city. In a rather uninspired backyard, MSB arrived to transform the garden. They began with painting the wall blue. When they left, this house was transformed into a Zen space with bamboo trellises and a water body. With limited space on the ground, they hung terracotta pots on the wall, allowing perennials to blossom. They planted ferns, monsteras and caladiums, all hardy plants, creating an easy-maintenance garden with minimal landscaping interventions.

Balcony view: Start with easy plants such as ladies finger, brinjal, tomato and palm. Her P-shaped balcony hosts flowers, fruits, herbs and vegetables, grouped and gathered for effective cross-pollination.

On Top of Things: Kapil Mandawewala started Sajeev Fresh in 2010 to grow healthy nutritious food in cities. Currently managing his business in Delhi, he’s been busy creating rooftop gardens.

Sunken Pleasures Architects Cyrus Patell and Eliza Higgins of Collective Project transformed a 750 sq ft unused extension of a house into a densely planted garden. The architects excavated the ground to make a sunken path using local black granite. A semi-enclosed pod made from strips of locally reclaimed wood is the nucleus of this landscaped garden. Depending on the occasion, it becomes a reading area, a lounge and a covered stage.