Sixteen years learning what lives on a roof.

I'm Ray Hanvey. I've been growing living roofs commercially for sixteen years, and I was the first person to make it work on the island of Ireland.

Natira works from the shore of Larne Lough on the Antrim coast of Ireland. Everything we put on a roof starts here — as seed from our own seed bank or a certified supplier, sown on a bench and grown on a fifty-two week schedule before it ever travels to a roof in England, Ireland or anywhere between.

Nothing is bought in as a mystery mix. Nothing is wild-collected.

We are a small practice and that is the point. We compose one roof at a time, for the architect, contractor or homeowner who wants the roof to belong to the building — and we would rather do fewer roofs properly than many roofs approximately.

Every plant we grow is a native of these islands, of known and named species, chosen for thin, dry, wind-scoured ground — because that is what a roof is. Our nursery sits in the Atlantic weather: if a plant thrives on a bench above Larne Lough, it will thrive on a roof. When we say the planting will live happily at 100mm with no irrigation, it's because it is doing exactly that on our own benches now.

You're putting a garden somewhere you would never expect to see one. It's a very special thing. We understand that. The magic of it still gives me so much energy, sixteen years in.

Not planted. Composed.

A composed ecology is a planting designed cell by cell for one roof. The exposed face takes the plants of the shore, the sheltered corner takes the tallest species, and a binding grass — red fescue, the matrix — is threaded through everything so that twenty or thirty species read as one composition.

The palette is built from the ground the building stands on. A roof in Kent draws on the chalk downland of Thanet. A roof in Bristol carries the county flower of its city. A roof in Donegal draws on the machair. Every species is a native of these islands, documented in its landscape, and grown to order at our own nursery.

Every plant we specify is raised, from seed, at our nursery. We know its species, its provenance, and what it will do at 100mm on a bench above Larne Lough. We do not sow mixes on roofs. Every plant that lands arrives already alive.

What a composed roof asks of you

Honestly — very little, and we would rather say it plainly. The system goes down in a day: drainage board, 100mm of substrate, the plants set out by colour-coded box to the plan, a dressing of LECA, and a deep soak in. No specialist trade, no machinery.

It takes a full season to knit and a second to come into its own. In the height of its first summer a young roof might need a few soakings. After establishment the roof asks for almost nothing — no feeding, no replanting; these are plants of thin, dry ground. But the summers are changing, and a long dry spell can press even a settled roof. So the whole of the guidance is this: if you look at the roof and think it might need water — it does. Water it. You cannot harm a free-draining roof.

Send us your roof drawing.

That is genuinely all we need to begin — a drawing, a photograph, or even the address and a rough size.

What comes back is a proposal composed for your roof alone: the palette drawn from your ground, the planting plan, the specification, the flowering year, and an honest account of what the roof will ask of you.

We would rather you judged it for yourself.

Architects sometimes prefer to see the plants before they commission. Larne is a short flight from anywhere in England, and a day at the nursery — walking the trays, standing on the display roof, lunch by the water — is the best introduction. Write and we will arrange it.