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Green roof companies are sprouting up all around the country. There’s a large concentration of them along the Mid-Atlantic States, but they’ve been in operation all across the nation for the last five years. The idea of roof-top gardens isn’t new. They trace back at least as far as ancient Babylon. Consultants at Green Roof Technology speak of older civilizations that created earthen huts or modified caves that doubled as gardens and spiritual centers.  Unlike today’s rooftop gardens, these tended to leak and crumble.

Eco-roofs really caught hold again in Germany of the late 1970s. Jörg Breuning was introduced to the practice as a German landscape company employee. He brought the system and his experience to Maryland in 1988 and founded Green Roof Technology to develop less expensive and lightweight systems that would suit American architecture.

Rooftop green gardens

Living Roofs, Inc. is the first company in Florence, South Carolina to focus on commercial, residential, and institutional buildings. The company installed this 28,500 square-foot garden roof atop the city’s Federal Courthouse. (Read more about Living Roofs.)

Residential Eden

This three-level house with rooftop gardens is also super insulated and has nary an energy footprint with its passive solar array. Located on a hill north of San Francisco, this home to three generations of one family is a green work of beauty.  Look at the interiors!

Grow your own

This garden work in San Francisco’s Embarcadero proves that building architecture need not limit the creation of green rooftops. Rachel Mathews of the Successful Garden Design blog notes that in planning a rooftop garden, you’ll need to determine how to maximize usable space (including walls), discover how much weight the roof can bear, select the right plants for your climate and round up the lightest materials you can.

Why not give it a try?

I recently read a news story about HomeVestors, that company that has billboards and drives vans decked with the words, “We Buy Ugly Homes.”  And they do just that, picking up homes that real estate agents have given up hope of ever selling.  I’m sure there are fine examples in your part of town or country. With sagging roofs or siding so chipped that it looks like psoriasis on a mule, they loom out from the other homes. Often, their home interiors are worse–bedrooms with walled up closets, kitchens that are too narrow for noodles, or five-bedroom homes with a one-half bath.

CNN Money reports that HomeVestors often picks up homes that truly have virtues on the inside, but buyers can’t get past their ugly exteriors. The company has 200 franchisees, each on the look for “diamonds in the rough.”

Here are some roughs, sans any apparent diamonds:

Things might get ugly

I’d rather live in a refrigerator box beneath the overpass than move in here. Ugliness abides. There’s an entire website dedicated to the ugly called, uncannily enough, Ugly House Photos.

Gateway to the worst

Ah, the grandeur of St. Louis–the majestic Mississippi, the splendid arch rising from the shoreline and this turquoise shack along the highway. Almost gives you chills.

Borderline ugly

This freshly painted home in Mexicali (south of the California line) proves that ugliness knows no bounds. It looks like the stencil print children make from tempera ink using cut-out ends of a large potato. Tan feo, hombre!

Beast of burden

I wrote about his house before on the blog, but it deserves a reprieve. I cherish the tall crop of grass edges and the delightful use of contrasting oil stains on the drive.

Camden yards

This house in New Jersey was among 13 entrants in the Cramer Hill Ugly Home Contest run in 2009 by local churches bent on reforming the neighborhood ambiance. See the details at the Cramer Hill/CCOP website.

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like ugly. I have plenty of other photos, but this is all I can take, friends.