UCSF’s Largest Rooftop Gardens Undergo Vibrant Year-Long Transformation

Something is blooming above UC San Francisco’s Parnassus Heights campus. 

It’s atop the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building, which serves as the headquarters of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research – where scientists are accelerating bold research to understand and treat the world’s most devastating diseases. 

Above them, roughly 17,000 square feet of green space has recently undergone a year-long transformation from commonplace fescue grass to meadow-like tranquility, bringing the University’s largest rooftop gardens back to life in stunning, colorful fashion. 

 “It’s hard to have a bad science day when you arrive to weather like this and beautiful flowers outside,” said Cassandra Belair, PhD, researcher, UCSF Department of Urology, and director of research operations, UCSF Broad Stem Cell Center. “Even when it’s foggy and cold, the garden is still inspiring. You just want to be there.” 

And many people have been, returning to the garden to help plant it alongside UCSF gardeners and take advantage of its renewal.

Led by director Tippi MacKenzie, MD, the center houses investigators advancing stem cell therapies through gene editing and cell engineering, driving scientific discovery, and developing cures for diseases including Alzheimer’s, diabetes and infertility, with a focus on aging, pregnancy and healing through CRISPR innovations.  

“This visionary building supports our most ambitious research,” MacKenzie said. “Our stem cell scientists are harnessing their expertise in developmental biology combined with newly generated tools in genome engineering to develop life-saving therapies for patients with a range of diseases.” 
 

Starting Over

Built on a 60-degree slope, the 68,926-square-foot building structure for stem cell science is a series of four split-level pods, each nine feet higher than the last and ascending westward high above the historic campus. The pods feature patios with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco and beyond, and until recently, all had terraced grass roofs. 

That was, until Dunja Duranovic, UCSF Facilities west campus landscape supervisor, tried her hand at reimagining the gardens with a nod to sustainability. 

“The original grass was very water intensive,” she said. “It was about eight inches thick. Nothing else could grow. We tried to plant some wildflowers but the grass would just choke everything out.” The original fescue grass and landscape design was a holdover from when the building opened to national acclaim in late 2011. 

The irrigation system also was dysfunctional and the grass was so thick it couldn’t be fixed. 

So, Duranovic did the most logical thing – she stopped watering the gardens, let them die and went to work sketching an entirely new look and feel. First, she designed a landscape plan rich with plants, shrubs and wildflowers that didn’t require a lot of water. She also tracked down flora that could survive and thrive in the unique weather conditions at Parnassus Heights. 

Many of those included plants and flowers native to California, like Pacific Coast iris, columbine, sticky monkey-flowers, flowering currant, California lilac, hummingbird sage, poppies, bluebells and more. 

Finally, Duranovic laid it all out for the rooftop space, considering the direction of the sunrise and sunset, placement of the existing concrete patios and shaded sections of the gardens due to awnings on top of the building itself. 

The result? A diverse, meadow-like garden in all four rooftop spaces with biodegradable cardboard underneath the soil to suppress weeds and help with water retention. 

Another benefit to such a biodiverse environment is more pollinators. 

“We have seen a lot more native bees on the roof,” Duranovic said. “You usually don’t see them on campus. When I walk around the gardens in the morning, I’ll see them sleeping in the flowers.” The new annual flowers are expected to eventually reseed themselves too, cutting down on required maintenance. 

Community effort 

The effort to haul away the old gardens and replant new ones wasn’t easy. 

Each pod is now home to roughly 1,500 new plants, many of which came up nine floors through the elevator. The mulch was an entire undertaking unto itself. An outside company blew hundreds of pounds of mulch up from a nearby street using hoses. 

It wasn’t all a heavy lift, though. 

There was a community aspect to the replanting, as employee volunteers from the four pods joined UCSF gardeners in separate events to home some of the new plants. “We basically laid everything out based on the design,” Duranovic said. “The volunteers came and they planted alongside our team. We planted this whole thing in one day. It was awesome.” 

Each pod was planted chronologically between October 2023 and May 2024. 

Now, as Pods A and B are virtually in full bloom with Pods C and D not far behind, Duranovic is beginning to literally reap what she has sowed. “When I come here and I see people using the space eating lunch and having meetings, it’s really rewarding.” 

She counts Serine Avagyan, MD, PhD, assistant professor, UCSF Department of Pediatrics, in that group. Avagyan is an early riser, so she gets to see the Pod A gardens from her office in Pod B in a whole new light almost every weekday. “I write literally facing the garden all the time,” she said. “I position myself to physically face the garden because it’s just sort of Zen. It’s just so calming.” 

Kelsey Collins, PhD, assistant professor, Departments of Orthopedic Surgery and Anatomy, has a slightly different view of the gardens, facing the roof of Pod B from her office in Pod C. 

“One of UCSF’s core values is celebrating diversity and having an inclusive space,” Collins said. “I noticed that there’s a lot of different kinds of flowers in the garden now. It’s more of a wildflower look, rather than being perfect and pristine. That celebrates the values of diversity and all kinds of different science and different approaches and perspectives in the building.”