One Midland company is taking big city-style landscaping and bringing it to the Tri-City area.
Reder Landscaping is working on a penthouse terrace garden, something that could be seen in the high rises of Chicago and New York, on the top floor of a condominium complex near the Saginaw River in Bay City.

“Reder Landscaping’s business has been primarily residential landscaping,” said Larry Emeott, landscape architect on the project. “This is the really the first building that’s even had this type of an outdoor space connected to it, a high rise,” he said of gardens in the area.
The need for the garden came when the owners of the condo wanted to bring the feel of having a garden to their riverfront home.

“They wanted something that would break up the long space and really make it far more comfortable and livable,” Emeott said of the condo’s large patio.

“It’s like having a patio out your back door, but it’s just a big patio up five floors.”
But putting a garden on the roof terrace had a series of built-in hurdles. First, there’s no earth to plant in five stories up, so Reder crews had to work with specialized planters.
“What we have there is some really unique self-watering containers,” said Paul Reder, president of the company. The largest of these containers, which the trees grow in, are four feet in diameter and weigh 1,500 pounds.

The plants for the project were all grown at Reder’s nursery in these large containers, and then hauled to the job site and lifted up via crane. They are all self-watering, and only need to be refilled every three to four weeks.

The garden also had to be designed with future owners of the condo in mind.
“One of the requirements is we could not attach anything to the deck material or the building. This landscape has to be able to be dismantled or removed,” Emeott said.

The other problem is simply the environment. With no larger trees to protect smaller plants, species choice was important.

“We’re up there five stores in the air and we’re really exposed to the elements with a south facing terrace,” Emeott said. So, his design used resilient species such as junipers, yucca, sedum and amur maple and hawthorn trees, which claim the larger planters. Gravel and flagstone were brought in to create a Zen rock garden.

“They are tough plants, and pretty drought resistant, and can take hot sunshine,” he said, all factors in the urban growing environment. The smaller trees will be trimmed to keep them in check so they won’t outgrow their planters.

Emeott thinks with a boom in condo development in Bay City, and possibly in the future in other waterfront areas in the Tri-Cities, this style of gardening could gain popularity in the area.
The garden is not quite finished, and crews plan on wrapping it up in the coming week.