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" As part of last year&amp;#039;s Kips Bay Decorator ShowHouse\u2014an annual benefit for the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club, a social-service organization enriching the lives of about 12,000 New York City children aged six to 18\u2014garden designer Richard Heller transformed a barren terrace space above the first floor of a circa-1896 town house into a captivating outdoor room. The centerpiece is a 20-by-18-foot knot garden planted with a mixture of boxwood, variegated privet and leucothoe, and white pansies.   This seating area, evoking a medieval outdoor pavilion, faces designer Richard Heller&amp;#039;s green-roof space. Entering from the rear of the home&amp;#039;s second floor and passing a latticework divider, you first see the gracious seating area\u2014a gauzy, canopied sofa in front of a cocktail table flanked by two chairs (all furniture and cushions are weatherproof). The floor is antique limestone. Beyond lies the brick-bordered parterre, surrounded by grass. The far wall&amp;#039;s nook shelters a classical-style statue; a stone platform with topiaries and other plantings atop it lines the right wall.   At the start, Heller and his team found a hard surface with virtually no landscaping.  Heller chose to create a formal garden of this sort because it is in keeping with the home&amp;#039;s French Renaissance Revival style and its intricate tapestried planting pattern lends visual interest when viewed both from the home&amp;#039;s facing rooms and its higher windows. The surrounding grass, vertical latticework, and elegant topiary in terra-cotta planters may reference the charming qualities of a historic courtyard garden, but the plot is decidedly 21st-century, and offers both ecological and aesthetic benefits.   The finished formal garden is the standout feature of this outdoor room on a terrace above the first floor of a New York town house.  Most old-style roof gardens involve a combination of decking and planters, but in this up-to-date green roof, designed and constructed by Heller and his team in less than three weeks, a shallow planting bed and a grass&amp;quot;carpet&amp;quot; cover most of the surface, and the use of pots is restricted to the perimeter. The principle is that a thin blanket of living plants insulates a roof from extremes of heat and cold and can thus cut energy costs. (In fact, a Canadian study showed that a 6-inch-thick green roof reduced heat gains by 95 percent and heat losses by 26 percent compared with a conventional one.) By absorbing heat from their surroundings in the process of transpiration, the plants on an urban green roof can help lower temperatures around them, alleviating the climatic phenomenon known as heat island effect, whereby city and suburban districts are noticeably warmer (up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit) than rural areas. For more product information view Landscapes in May 2007 Resources "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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