Organic Gardening Magazine

Your complete guide to gardening - naturally!

To boldly go where other plants would fail

Toby Buckland shows you how to attract feathered friends with a sedum-roofed bird feeder made from an old hanging basket and a timber plank

Forget blue fence paint and decking, to my mind the greatest garden innovation of the last few decades has been the sedum green-roof.

If you’ve not come across one (where have you been?) it’s a roof – usually flat – that’s covered in a living tapestry of sedum plants that survive in the soilless conditions above the tiles or tar.

Their amazing ability to grow where other plants would fail is down to their water-filled leaves - evolved to see them through droughts and allow them to live in the most meagre of soils. In fact their natural habitat is the rocks and cliffs of places such as Dartmoor (hence their common name of stonecrop) but you’re just as likely to come across them clinging to stones down the middle of a motorway.

Sedums for green roofs aren’t sold in pots like normal garden plants but mail-order, boxed up like pizzas in mats measuring to1m across (see You Will Need box). Each mat is made up of three layers – a fabric backing that holds the mat together; a middle layer consisting of a soil-filled nylon weave (like a door-mat) and a topping of growing sedums rooted into the soil. To use, the roof is covered with a sheet of waterproof plastic and a layer of capillary matting (a soft felt-like fabric), laid on top to hold extra water and provide grip for the roots.

On the roof sedums are brilliant, protecting the tar or tiles from the weather and insulating the building beneath - but they have other uses in the garden too. They instantly blend new structures with their surroundings and ‘green’ previously impossible to plant places – something that’s really important now that the average size of gardens is shrinking to reduce the carbon footprint in built-up areas.

I’ve had a sedum roof on my garden office for four years and during that time it’s got better and better as other plants (seedlings from the surrounding gardens) have taken up residence among the stonecrops and more birds have come to peck around for grubs and nesting material. Inspired by these feathered friends I’ve made this sedum-roofed bird feeder from an old hanging basket and a timber plank. Although the sedum is tough enough to survive in soilless conditions (as long as there’s some capillary matting or felt for it to cling to), given a little compost it positively thrives, sending up a flush of white flowers every summer – and that’s why I’ve packed out the centre of the basket with good compost to fuel its growth. The compost also makes it possible to plant other interesting succulents and I’ve added some sempervivum or ‘house leaks’ (so called because they’d grow among roof tiles in their native Turkistan plugging leaks!) for their star-shaped flowers and leafy rosettes but any drought-tolerant plant with succulent water-filled leaves would work – check out the alpine section at your local nursery or garden centre for inspiration.

Hung in a sunny spot the plants will look after themselves although it does pay to give them a drink in prolonged dry weather and to give them a sprinkle of balanced organic fertiliser to keep them green and growing.

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