GREAT GREEN HEIGHTS: CINCINNATI'S GREEN ROOFS AND ROOFTOP GARDENS with ROSE HENRY SEEGER
- Jennifer Jewell
- Sep 11
- 6 min read
In 2008, Cincinnati, Ohio, AKA the Queen City, developed the program that has earned them their secondary nickname: Green City. The Green Cincinnati Plan (GCP) is a now- 17 year running community vision updated every regularly to address climate change and build a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient future for its citizens.
2008 was also the year that garden/grower by nature and engineer by profession, Rose Henry Seeger, was introduced to the amazing concept of Green Roofs as a way to make architecture integral to a more sustainable and healthy urban future.
Green roofs providing positive and healing benefits for both the environment and its people brought Rose’s interest in growing and engineering together and she’s never looked back since founding Green City Resources, a Cincinnati based, woman-owned company specializing in the design, installation and maintenance of stormwater management systems; bioretention, vegetated / green roofing, rainwater harvesting and native/sustainable landscaping. Many of their gardens do all of this as well as being healing and horticulture therapy gardens.
Green City Resources has created green roofs and rooftop gardens from University and hospital buildings, to private homes. One truly moving story Rose shared with me in person exemplifies just such care. Since the founding of her business, Rose and Green City Resources have been integral to the creation, expansion, care, and success of The Rothenberg School Rooftop Gardens – a story of saving, renovating, and reimaging an historic building, The Rothenberg Preparatory Academy. Along with a coalition of others, Rose fundraised for it, designed it and built it. She now serves as the chair of the non-profit board that administers the garden, pays the garden staff who run the program, and everything at no cost to the school.
As Rose shared with me “this inner city now-public school and its garden curriculum is going on 13 years and to me has had a ripple down effect propagating so many other programs, cooking with the parents, jr hort, young entrepreneurs, reading in the garden program, and more.” The rooftop garden at the Rothenberg school believes in "Smart, healthy, Kids."
Their vision is to enhance students’ development of critical thinking, science, math and literacy skills through hands-on application of classroom curriculum and increased community involvement through their engagement with Rooftop School Garden.
Every year they:
Serve more than 400 students through 4 garden programs
Engage over 150 parent and community volunteers
Harvest over 30 pounds of fresh produce that is eaten, prepared and distributed to families
Engage 35 University students in garden activities
Enhance the STEM skills of 100 students through targeted programming
Amazing cultivation of place and people with care. This is Cultivating Place at elevation. Enjoy!
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All photos Courtesy of Rose Henry Seeger, Green City Resources. All rights reserved.
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Thinking out loud this week...
Hey hey, it's Jennifer—
I love the creative and intelligent design inherent in the concept of green roofs… I want to see them everywhere. I know there are engineering and retrofit costs to anything like getting green roofs or green roofs AND SOLAR onto more buildings in developed spaces but I also know we are a super smart and adaptable species – we figure out things we need or want when it’s urgent.
And in my opinion smarter designer and engineering are urgent. When I see Solar Farms going up on otherwise unused land, like all around the Denver CO and Sacramento, CA international airports while there are Acres and acres of uncovered, single level asphalt parking lots — I want to scream or cry. What are we thinking? Truly.
The win win of solar or green shade structures over such spaces just makes sense. Green roofs are gorgeous, beneficial, and possible.
Let’s support more of them. And check out the photos of the Green Roofs — like the 2.5 acre Prairie at mercy Hospital. Incredible, smart, and adaptive. We can cultivate our places with creativity ingenuity and care.
I am so so humbled and lit up by the wonderful in person experience I had with so many big G gardeners of Cincinnati at the Cincinnati Public Radio’s fabulous headquarters yesterday. IT WAS GREAT TO BE ONE OF YOU Cincinnati Gardeners!! Thank you for the warm welcome and sense of community.
Speaking of Community — really excited to gather with many of you on Tuesday the 16th for our next CP Communing in front of the Autumnal Equinox when our focus will be the art of cultivating place well and all the ways we are inspired and encouraged in art by our places and plants. Registration will close for this CP Communing on Monday the 15th, hope to see you all there!
Space is limited to encourage conversation, so please make sure to register — it is free!
A couple of other Public Growing Announcements:
Registration is still open for Designing Change: Landscape Continuity in an Age of Uncertainty, Wednesday and Thursday October 15–16, 2025 at Longwood Gardens. Registration closes Sept 30th — so get your seats now for this thought provoking and field expanding gathering.
The Garden Conservancy’s summer Garden Open Days are ripening with the season and there are so many great gardens and garden activities including digging deeper programs and cider making Saturday the 13th and Saturday the 20th of September – including the gardens of Frances Palmer, and Edwina Von Gal’s Marshouse, and Janet Mavec’s Bird Haven Farm — whose new book is open for pre-orders now! And don’t forget The Garden Conservancy’s author webinar series regularly — one I am looking forward to is The New Beautiful: Innovative Spaces and the Changing Face of Gardens Tuesday, October 21, 2025 Time (EST): 2 pm - 3 pm
There is a lot growing and changing in our Garden world — growing us for the better. Don’t forget the power of every act of big G Gardening….friends. Things look up — up to the rooftops - when we exercise this power with brains and heart. Really happy to be here together with you all to support it, nurture it, guide it.
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