Gardening on rooftops, balconies, and terraces is a popular trend. After thirty-five years of experience, Susan Brownmiller writes with honesty and humor about her oasis twenty floors above a Manhattan street. She reports the catastrophes: losing daytime access during building-wide renovations; assaults from a mockingbird during his mating season. And the joys: a peach tree fruited for fifteen years; the windswept birches lasted for twenty-five. Butterflies and bees pay annual visits. She pampers a buddleia, a honeysuckle, roses, hydrangeas, and more. Her adventures celebrate the tenacity of nature, inviting readers to marvel at her garden's resilience, and her own.;Hello, terrace -- Wind -- The birches -- The chores of March -- A water feature -- Bushels of peaches -- A field of coreopsis -- Experimental stations -- Coming up roses -- Butterflies in the garden -- Daylily dreams -- A peony bush -- Hydrangeas -- My thirty-year geraniums -- My iris experience -- Riotous annuals -- Boston ivy -- Honeysuckle is nostalgia -- Helping a clematis -- Alas, the roaming cat -- The mockingbird on the rooftop -- Fall is for reckoning -- Epilogue: A woman's way.