Five Accra Car Park Roofs With Trees, Ranked by Shade at 14:00
Kofi Mensah-Brandt plants gardens where people leave their cars. We held a 30-metre tape against the afternoon sun and counted who noticed.
The tape is 30 metres long. Kofi Mensah-Brandt holds one end. I hold the other, on a roof in Osu, at 14:00, in 31 degrees.
The rules are simple. Shade is square metres of roof in shadow. Cars noticing is the number of parked cars that chose the shade over the empty bays nearby.
**5. Nyame Court, Adabraka.** Shade: 9 m². Cars noticing: 0. Three young neem trees, 1.2 metres tall. Each has a stake. The stakes cast almost as much shade as the trees. Mensah-Brandt says give them four years. The cars have not been told.
**4. Palm & Tin Arcade, Kaneshie.** Shade: 22 m². Cars noticing: 2. Frangipani in concrete planters, flowering anyway. A white taxi sits under the biggest one with its windows down. The driver is asleep. He does not count as noticing. He was there first.
**3. Labone Cashew Deck.** Shade: 41 m². Cars noticing: 6. Cashew trees, nine of them, planted in a ring. One driver reversed out of a sunny bay, drove round the ramp and came back into a shady one. Total distance: 140 metres. Total gain: about four degrees.
**2. Mahogany Court, Ridge.** Shade: 58 m². Cars noticing: 9. The attendant has a plastic chair under the second tree. He moves it with the shadow, every forty minutes. He has noticed more than any car on this list.
**1. Ofori Yard, Dzorwulu.** Shade: 96 m². Cars noticing: 17. Eleven trees, a pergola of passion fruit and a drip line Mensah-Brandt laid himself over two weekends. By 13:40 the sunny half of the roof is empty. The shady half is full, nose-in, like a row of cattle.
I ask him whether he planted it for the cars.
"For the soil," he says. "The soil needed company."
We roll up the tape. In the last spare square of shade at Ofori Yard, a man is selling iced water from a cool box. He was there before the trees.
