Sharmin Akter has built a three-tier garden of about 2,600 square feet on the roof and ground floor of a three-storey house in Binodpur, Rajshahi. It holds more than 3,500 plants of about 110 local and foreign species, and selling seedlings and pots from it now earns her about Tk 12 lakh a year, Amar Desh reports.
A former student of the Management Studies department at Rajshahi University, she started small, as a hobby, in 2022. Her garden took first place in the category for rooftop gardens created by individuals and institutions in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change's National Award for Tree Plantation 2025. Its formal name is Nature's Touch; locally it is known as Krishibari, the farm house.
Indoor plants include adenium, aglaonema, anthurium, peace lily, snake plant, succulents, ferns and cacti. Among the medicinal plants are lemongrass, stevia, kalmegh, neem, rosemary, oregano and pathorkuchi. She also keeps threatened native trees such as camphor, ashoka, hijal, palash, mahua and banyan.
The roof grows mango, jamun, jackfruit, lychee, strawberry, rambutan, avocado and apple, and vegetables including chilli, tomato, bottle gourd, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, aubergine, bitter gourd and drumstick. Seedlings are sold online and offline, three workers are employed full time, and she says she plans to create jobs for more than 50 people in Rajshahi.
"A rooftop garden is not just a hobby. It is a promising sector for protecting the environment, producing safe food and creating jobs," Sharmin Akter said. She heard plenty of disparaging remarks at the start, she said; now people come to her for advice on earning from a garden.
Her husband, Jahangir Alam, works in Baneshwar in Rajshahi. He collects seedlings from different places and helps send orders by courier to buyers around the country. For city households with a roof to spare, her venture shows that raising and selling seedlings from rooftop plants can become a steady income.
Photo: A rooftop garden in Sylhet, AbuSayeed / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Amar Desh
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