This garden doesn’t look like much. It seems rather scrubby, at first.
Look at that garden in a larger context, however, and it starts to look a lot better:
That garden is being grown on the rooftop of a three story building in East End London, by someone who seems to want to create a bit of green while living in the middle of the city. Maybe that person’s neighbors are hunkering for a bit of green themselves, but they haven’t acted on it.
What this photograph shows to me is that there is a lot of room for the greening of our world’s cities. The simple act of putting plants up on the roof would make a big difference, if most people did it. Plants cool the air around them, and clean it as well, removing toxic pollution as well as carbon dioxide.
Putting scrubby gardens on all those East End rooftops wouldn’t end global warming on its own, but it could be one piece of a comprehensive solution. It would look better, too.
