CITY GARDENS. 
87 
roof gardening is quite common, and, with such unbroken 
table-lands as most of our city house-tops present, there 
appears to be no serious obstacle to brilliant success. A 
roof garden has the peculiar advantage of being well out of 
the way of thievish hands. 
The roof of an L or back building, which is attached to 
many houses, is the most favorable for this experiment, and 
more easily reached for work or enjoyment. It may be 
converted either into a garden or a greenhouse with the 
most gratifying results. In the latter case, it could easily 
be heated in v/inter from the kitchen range or the furnace. 
A shed only twenty feet by fifteen would be sufficient for a 
large collection of flowering plants, a cold grapery, or a cold 
peach house—almost any fruit, indeed, that might be desired. 
If a garden only is aimed at, the roof must be made strong 
enough to bear the pressure. A bottom should then be laid 
of coarse materials for drainage, filling up with compost. 
The roof garden is only a window-box on a mammoth 
scale, and everything of the vegetable, flower, or fruit order 
can be made to grow as well here as on the ground. The 
arrangement must depend on the shape and size of the roof, 
and its peculiar exposure. Long, narrow wooden boxes, 
placed just inside the ledge or railing, may be used for 
plants, instead of the bare roof. These can be painted a dull 
red, and filled with good garden earth mixed with manure. 
They can be managed exactly like a flower border. Wis¬ 
taria and Virginia-creeper, planted at each end, may be 
trained to unite across the front, forming, with the delicate 
blossoms and richly tinted leaves, perfect representations 
of spring and autumn. The generous foliage of both these 
vines will sufficiently shade the smaller plants in the boxes. 
In an inclosure of this kind thirty feet by fifteen, which 
was outside the windows of a drawing-room on the second 
floor, and bounded on all sides by chimney pots, there were 
more than sixty boxes, some of which had been in use over 
