Journal
Terrace gardening, landscaping ideas and garden design ideas from what we have learnt building and maintaining gardens in Rajasthan — written for people who want the detail, not the brochure.
Most garden writing is written by people who have not had to keep a garden alive through a Rajasthan May.
Everything here comes out of work the studio has actually done — which species held and which did not, what order the construction has to happen in, what a maintenance year really involves, and what goes wrong when the sequence is rushed.
It is deliberately specific. Named species, real depths, actual months. If a piece here could have been written about any garden anywhere, it should not be on this page.
Where most of this writing sits.
Terrace and rooftop gardening is the subject we are asked about most, and the one where the published advice is least reliable — most of it is written for climates where a container does not reach 50 °C by mid-afternoon and where the water supply does not change character between March and July.
A terrace garden in Rajasthan is really four problems stacked on top of each other, and they have to be solved in order. Load comes first: what the slab will carry, wet, with people standing on it. Waterproofing and drainage come second, because they are the only part that cannot be corrected later without taking the garden apart. Irrigation comes third, sized to containers that dry faster than ground beds. Planting comes last, and is the part everyone wants to start with.
Get the order wrong and the failure is not gradual. It shows up as a leak into the room below, or as an entire terrace of dead planting after one week in May.
The four pieces below cover that sequence end to end — species selection, the construction order, what changes when the terrace is small, and what a full roof build involves. They are written from schemes the studio has built and maintained, so the depths, months and species are the real ones.
The rest of the year.
The writing continues weekly, working through the questions that arrive most often: what garden maintenance actually involves month by month, what landscaping costs and which decisions move the number, terrace gardening across India’s climate zones, drought-resistant planting for Rajasthan, and a month-by-month calendar for the Rajasthan garden year.
If you have a question about a site — a roof that might not carry a garden, a lawn that will not hold through summer, an irrigation system nobody has serviced in three years — it is usually faster to ask the studio directly than to wait for the post.
Latest
Plants that actually survive a terrace in Rajasthan
Species by species, with the failure modes, container depths and the summer regime that keeps them alive.
Setting up a terrace garden: the order the work has to happen in
Load, waterproofing, drainage, irrigation, medium, planting. Getting the sequence wrong is what causes leaks.
Small terrace gardens: what works when you have four metres
What fits in four metres, what to leave out, and the mistakes that make a small terrace feel smaller.
Roof terrace gardens: turning an unused roof into a room
The types, the constraints, and how to judge whether your roof can carry one.
Tell us about the site.
Every scheme begins with a survey. Send us the essentials and we will arrange one, then return a drawn plan — not a quotation against an assumption.
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