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Green Roof Substrates

Green Roof Substrates are specifically engineered for different types of roof greening, both for domestic and commercial projects.

These growing media have been carefully designed to contain various properties essential for a green roof habitat, such as:

being lightweight
having good water-holding capacities
free-draining
having a low nutrient content (keeping the roof low maintenance)
good porosity (ensuring good aeration within the soil)

All our green roof substrates contain recycled secondary aggregates (like crushed brick) and an organic component (soil / compost), which are blended together in different ratios for various green roof substrate blends.

Extensive Green Roof Substrates are for use on shallow green roof systems (<200mm depth) and are often associated with Sedum mat, Sedum plug plant or wildflower planting. Read more about them here.

Intensive Green Roof Substrates are engineered to suit larger vegetation, such as shrubs and trees. Intensive green roofs can be considered “roof gardens”, read more about them here.

Our exciting new range of extensive substrates includes:

Sedum Mix – specifically designed for Sedum mat or plug plant systems.
Wildflower Mix – designed for both wildflower mats and wildflower seeded roofs.
Brownroof Mix – engineered to contain larger aggregate particle sizes (to imitate natural “wasteland” sites).
Acid Grassland Mix – formulated to provide a lower pH value to mimic that of natural acidic grassland.

Our green roof substrate blends are modified for all these different planting schemes so please get in touch with us for the best type for your product. We also recommend certain depths of growing media for particular planting, so if you are unsure of what you require please get in contact.

All our substrates are based on the German FLL green roof guidelines to ensure that all essential properties have been considered and tested. Boughton Loam has supplied substrate for many successful green roof projects all over the country – see our case studies section for more information.

Our green roof soil substrates have been developed and analysed for their chemical and physical properties by Sheffield University which enables us to offer ‘off the shelf’ lightweight green roof soil products to cater for various design criteria.