Urban Agriculture on the Rooftop
Michelle Nowak
Cornell University
Senior Honors Thesis
May 2004
The Rossetties liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof, a few of them
hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning as fragments...
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Urban Agriculture on the Rooftop
Michelle Nowak
Cornell University
Senior Honors Thesis
May 2004
The Rossetties liked to cultivate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof, a few of them
hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning as fragments of peculiar
alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize Wessex Saddleback
sows quartered there by Throp’s successor, and dead leaves off many decorative trees
transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the odd unstomachable meal thrown or
vomited there by this or that sensitive epicurean – all got scumbled together, eventually,
by the knives of the seasons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in
which anything could grow, not the least being bananas.
Pirate, driven to despair by the
wartime banana shortage, decided to build a glass hothouse on the roof, and persuade a
friend who flew the Rio-to-Ascension-to-Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling banana
tree or two, in exchange for a Germ
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