Total Environment
A long-running programme with one of India’s most design-led residential developers: landscape at ground level and roof gardens above it, on private terraces designed to carry real trees over structures that were never going to forgive a leak.
- Client
- Total Environment — Windmills of Your Mind and related developments
- Location
- Bengaluru, India
- Period
- 2009 onwards
- Sector
- Residential
- Programme start
- 2009
- Build-up
- Waterproofing, root barrier, drainage, filter, lightweight media
- Critical number
- Saturated media weight against structural allowance
- Media
- Coir-based lightweight blends over mineral aggregate
Scope
- Landscape delivery across residential developments including Windmills of Your Mind
- Roof garden and terrace-level landscape
- Lightweight growing media specification and blending
- Drainage, filtration and root barrier build-up coordination
- Irrigation design at terrace level
- Plant supply and establishment maintenance
Roof gardens are a structures problem before they are a planting problem
The number that governs a roof garden is the saturated weight of the growing medium, not the plant list. Ordinary topsoil at field capacity is punishing — a shallow bed can put a tonne per square metre onto a slab that was never asked to carry it.
Coir-based lightweight blends change that arithmetic. They hold water for the plant without holding the weight of soil, they resist collapse and compaction over years, and they can be specified with a stated electrical conductivity so that the salt load on a sealed, slow-draining terrace is known rather than assumed.
The build-up is where roof gardens fail
Almost every failed roof garden fails in the same three places: at the upstand where the waterproofing terminates, at the outlet where the drainage layer silts up because the filter fabric was omitted or lapped wrongly, and at the root barrier that was value-engineered out.
None of those are planting failures. They are sequencing and coordination failures, and they are prevented at drawing stage by the landscape contractor being in the room while the waterproofing is still being specified.
On site
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