Rooftop retreat

Couple creates English garden from eyesore

By Jomay Steen, Journal staff | Friday, August 29, 2008

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For a Hisega couple, it was a case of adding a garden or living with an eyesore of a rooftop view. When Joe and Nancy Engler bought their rustic hillside home in 1991, they knew they would have to do some extensive renovation.

But the Englers were willing to overlook the lack of electricity, water and sewer system for the beauty of the property. Once Joe retired from his furniture business, the couple moved from Oshkosh, Wis., into their beautifully remodeled fishing cabin in the Black Hills.

Joe Engler put together several building projects, including designing and landscaping an Oriental garden hat opens off their west bedroom. He constructed the deck, screens, lattices and Oriental detailing, and accentuated them with orchids, roses and a variety of flowers and trees.

When Nancy Engler proposed a new workspace for her quilt-making projects, it resulted in his newest garden.

“Only a couple of inches down below the soil, we’re sitting on solid rock. We couldn’t build under the house so we had to build out,” Joe Engler said of his property.

The 15-by-12-foot addition, a combination quilting room, office and media room, solved their space issue, but a new problem presented itself. “We looked out onto a black rubber roof,” Nancy Engler said.

From experience, Joe knew gardening was difficult at his place. Out of 162 tulips bulbs planted one fall, one tulip emerged the following spring, he said.

“When you live up here, it’s just hard to garden,” Engler said.

But a rooftop garden might be different.

Styled after an English garden, Joe considered the parameters of his space. The roof could only support a limited amount of weight, so he couldn’t use soil or sod like early pioneers once did. Heavy saturations of snow or rain onto sod or dirt covering the space would probably damage the roof’s surface or worse — cave in his roof.

Whatever covered the flat roof would have to be lightweight. Engler contacted seven different manufacturers to find the most durable, best-looking and longest-lasting artificial turf he could find. It was rolled out onto the space like a carpet.

“We’re probably the only people who vacuum their garden,” Nancy Engler said.

He then built the 12 planters and four flower boxes, setting each of the planters on one-inch footings above the floor so water would not become trapped beneath them, which would harm the turf or roof.

He installed each of the containers with a fabric liner to keep the soil from draining out of the container when watering the plants. Each planter was filled nearly to the top with polystyrene thermal insulation, then soil was added on top.

They chose a variety of flowers—a majority of them annuals—to carry out their English garden theme.

The rooftop garden has proven to be such a success for its owners that the Englers are planning Phase II for the remaining 12-by-9-foot space on the roof.

They want to create an herb, salad and cut flowers garden space that will include ornamental grasses, they said.

“The depth of the planters won’t be any more than I can reach,” Joe Engler added.

Contact Jomay Steen at 394-8418 or jomay.steen@rapidcityjournal.com.