To see the latest green trend, look up. Dave Lanfear of Brayton Street is among those encouraging people not to overlook their roofs.

When Lanfear, his wife, Alison Wilcox-Lanfear, and their son, 6-year-old Benjamin, moved into a house on Brayton Street near West Utica, it had a two-car garage in the backyard with a flat, decaying roof.

“The garage was in pretty rough shape, and ugly, too,” says Alison.

Today the roof on the one-story building is a neat, green oasis, planted with an assortment of sturdy sedum, some fine-textured grasses and even a few edibles, including chives and strawberry plants in pots.

For the Lanfears and their neighbors, it’s a win-win situation.

“The living roof cools the air rather than being just a hot piece of asphalt,” says Lanfear. The green roof slows rain runoff, keeps storm water out of the sewer system, and filters and purifies rain water. “It provides habitat for birds and beneficial insects, and it increases green space in a neighborhood,” he says.

Surprisingly, for those whose first reaction is concern that the thin layer of soil and plants might harm the roof, Lanfear, the owner of Bale on Bale Construction, says the opposite is true. “It makes the roof last a lot longer because the ultraviolet rays of the sun shining on the roof are what destroy that material.”

During Garden Walk Buffalo at the end of July, several hundred people climbed the wooden staircase to see the Lanfears’ living roof in what residents are calling the Five Points Green Corridor. Anchoring the corridor are Urban Roots Community Garden Center and the Five Points Bakery, just down the block on Rhode Island Street near the intersection with Brayton and West Utica.

The Lanfears’ roof, built last spring and summer, is no longer unique in the neighborhood. This year, Urban Roots acquired a small shed with a living roof that was built with recycled materials from Buffalo ReUse for the Junior League Show House.

And a few others have popped up in the region.

Menne Nursery in Amherst has a living roof in a grid system installed on a garden shed that was built for Plantasia a few years ago. The roof garden is flourishing, says Sally Cook, Menne’s manager of annuals and perennials.

Another green roof has taken root on the city’s east side, installed by Eric Fox of Fox Tires on a warehouse owned by the company. The installation added flowering plants and ground cover to the almost 10,000-square-foot roof of a building in the company’s William Street complex.

One roof at a time, the concept is growing.

Beating the heat

What’s wrong with the classic black asphalt or dark-shingled roof?

A lot, according to the California Academy of Sciences, which has covered the 197,000- square-foot roof of its new San Francisco building with a patchwork of native plants.

“The more typical black tar-and- asphalt building rooftop leads to a phenomenon called the ‘Urban Heat Island’ effect,” says the Academy on its Web site. “The endless swath of black rooftops and pavement trap heat, causing cities to be 6 to 10 degrees warmer than outlying greenbelt areas.”

On his own, Lanfear pointed out many houses where a slightly slanted porch roof sits right under upstairs windows, radiating heat into those rooms. Using a window air conditioner starts “a vicious cycle,” he says, cooling the specific room but emitting more heat outside.

“You can break the cycle with something as simple as a living roof planter box,” says Lanfear. “You can use composite decking and build a box 2 inches or 3 inches deep and plant that, which would give you some cooler air going into the window.”

Steeply pitched roofs—“and we have a lot of those in the city,” says Lanfear — pose a challenge to living roof installation. Lanfear says a roof that slopes 3 inches or less per foot can support the type of living roof he has on his garage.

But there are ways to work around pitched roofs. “We could build a grid of wood that will last long enough for the roots to establish themselves and become a big mat,” Lanfear says, or plants could be placed in plastic trays that are just laid on the pitched roof.

Taking the plunge

A living roof is fairly simple to install. After the existing roof is examined for structural integrity and shored up if necessary, it is covered with a waterproof membrane, then a thin layer of soil that is planted with vegetation chosen for the sunny, hot and sometimes dry conditions of a roof.

His own garage, which is about 20-by-20, with a slight slope toward the back, had suffered from years of neglect. After tearing off the old roofing, says Lanfear, “I took all the rotten wood out, replaced any of the rafters that were rotten, then doubled all those rafters up to handle the weight,” topping them with quality wooden decking.

The next step is installing the waterproof barrier that protects the roof.

Flexible, watertight material sold as pond liner can fill the bill. Once laid on the roof, the membrane should be extensively water-tested, drenched with water from a hose and watched for leaks. “That’s a very important step,” Lanfear says. “Once it’s up, it’s a pain to find any leaks.”

Next Lanfear adds a layer of used carpeting, installed upside- down. The carpet fibers act as a drain to allow water to run off the roof, while the backing helps hold the soil in place until the plants’ roots can infiltrate it.

Next comes the soil. The roof at Menne uses “basic potting soil,” says Cook. “These are plants that actually do better in a lean soil, so it wasn’t necessary to have a super-rich soil up there.”

Lanfear uses a mixture of crushed recycled concrete, for drainage, and about a quarter compost.

For the Lanfears’ living roof, the soil was brought up the staircase, one bucket at a time, with the help of volunteers from an Urban Roots workshop last spring. When the dirt was brought up, dumped and raked, it was about 2 inches deep all over the roof.

A full story above ground level, it was planting time.

Adding greenery

Alison Wilcox-Lanfear did most of the planting, following a patchwork design so they could see which plants did well in what areas. They chose seven types of sedum, as well as Jovibarba, known as “hens and chicks.”

Sedum and other succulents that store water in their leaves are the best for living roofs because they “can tolerate sun, heat and periodic dryness,” says Sally Cook of Menne Nursery.

Cook also added some blue fescue, “a terrific shorter grass that doesn’t mind a lot of sun and heat.” She accented the perennials with an annual, scaevola, also called fanflower.

Cook also suggests two other sun-lovers: portulacas and dianthus, particularly “those with the needle-like blue-green foliage that can take hotter, drier conditions.”

Raising the roof

The trend toward living roofs is growing. Lanfear is drawing up plans for one atop the rebuilt front porch of a Hoyt Street home and is installing one on a cement garage owned by a Lewiston church.

He has talked with a couple who would like to have a living roof on a building in downtown Niagara Falls planted with vegetation that echoes the native greenery of the nearby Niagara Gorge.

A living roof can be as complicated or as casual as you want. “The first one I did was on a round straw-bale shed in Hamburg,” says Lanfear, whose construction company (

www.baleonbale.com

) uses straw bales to construct durable, well-insulated, sustainable buildings. “I took an old piece of plastic that had been a billboard, and I threw that on top of the roof deck. I took the compost bin and dumped it up there, then I threw a bag of grass seed on there and it went ‘Whoosh,’ and sprouted up like a huge Chia pet.” No matter what you plant or where you plant it, birds, butterflies and beneficial insects will find your oasis in the sky.

“Our living roof is beautiful, especially from up above, when you can see it,” says Lanfear. The family often sits on the second- floor porch of their home, which gives them a prime view.

“It’s so much better than how it used to look,” says Wilcox- Lanfear. “There’s a great sense of satisfaction, and it’s beautiful to look at, too. There are so many squirrels and birds and interesting things going on up there.”

HIGH AND DRY

Plants that can live with little soil, care and watering are perfect for rooftop gardens. Some that work well in Western New York are:

Succulents

Sempervivum jovibarba “Hens and chicks”

Sedum acre “Aureum” or Gold Moss Sedum

Sedum album “Red ice”

Sedum spirium “Summer Glory”

Sedum kamtschaticum ”Russian stonecrop”

Sedum sexangulare “Watch chain stonecrop”

Other plants

Festuca glauca “Blue fescue grass”

Deschampsia flexuosa “Crinkled hairgrass”

Portulaca “Moss rose”

Dianthus “Pinks”

Allium shoenoprasum “chives”