A roof that has gone green all by itself. On the unplanned vegetation of northern Tenerife
In northern Tenerife, greenery doesn’t always wait for the designer. Sometimes it appears of its own accord: in a crack in the parapet, by a blocked drain, on a thin layer of dust blown in from the street, or in the porous, grouted surface of an old terrace. This is not a ‘roof garden’ in the catalogue sense. There are no system layers, species lists, automatic irrigation or renderings of people drinking coffee amongst ornamental grasses. Instead, there is something more interesting: a spontaneous record of the climate and the plants found in the area. The north of the island is more conducive to such surprises than the postcard-perfect, tourist-packed south. Tenerife is an island of microclimates, and its northern and north-eastern slopes remain under the strong influence of humid trade winds. Tenerife’s official tourist website describes how the island’s climate is shaped by, among other things, cold ocean currents, trade winds and orography, and notes that the greenery of the northern highlands is ‘shrouded in moisture’, whilst the...
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