Trainers and participants at the recent Building a Green City seminar in Mashhad were given an interesting tour of the City's open spaces. The tour included a visit to two retrofitted green roofs on the City Hall and the main building of the parks organisation. 

The Grass Roof Company been building green roofs in SW Essex for over 15 years. Both owners now have houses with green roofs. This one is a recent adition to the family of green roofs dotted across North and East London and Essex.

The Muse is home and office for Bere Architects and is one of London's exemplar green roofs. The combination of intensive, semi-intensive and extensive green roofs on one building shows how amenity, enjoyment and biodiversity can be designed into one building  providing as wide a range of environmental and ecosystem service benefits.

Creating extensive green roofs in hot dry climate's such as the Mediterranean are still in their infancy. There are a few in Greece , Italy and Spain but all too often approaches to green roofs are usually those that are more appropriate to more temperate Northern climes.

Livingroofs.org is always keen to see green roofs on schools. The 
Remarkables
 Primary 
School in Queenstown, South Island, New Zealand have been in touch to celebrate both their new school and it's green roof.It is the first green roof school in the whole of New Zealand.

It is now over ten years since the extenisve green roof was installed between the biomes at the Eden Project . The original green roof was provided by Alumasc-Exteriors Ltd and consisted of a intensive greeen roof with 200mm substrate.

The Oekowerk green roof in the Grunwald, Berlin  is an example of a green roof that started the modern green roof movement. The Ecological Centre was originally a water treatment centre built in around 1870. At that time it was common practice to waterproof buildings with a wet bitumen was highly inflammable. This was used on tenement blocks sitting side by side in the centre of the city and posed a huge fire risk. Therefore the wet bitumen was capped with a layer of sand about 6cm in depth. Over time the sand was colonised by vegetation.

Greece is an interesting country when it comes to roof and wall greening. Inadvertent and deliberate building greening is as old as the hills in Greece. If you go to any Greek village you will see bouganvilia and vines used for summer shading in many of the buildings.