At first sight, the old clay quarry didn’t look promising. Located in a remote part of south-west England, it was surrounded by a barren landscape and filled with mineral waste. But for Tim Smit, Dutch-born businessman and practical visionary, this was the ideal place to create a living landscape that would become a showcase of the world’s most important plants.
Originally an archaeologist, Smit had later worked in the music business as a songwriter and producer. Then, in the 1980s, he moved to Cornwall and became involved in a horticultural project to restore the formerly beautiful gardens of Heligan Manor. The gardens had become a wilderness after many of the men who worked there went away to fight in the First World War, and never returned. The discovery of a tiny room in one of the walled gardens inspired Smit and fellow enthusiasts to restore the garden to its former glory. “We were fired by a magnificent obsession to bring these once glorious gardens back to life in every sense,” explains the website of the Lost Gardens of Heligan. Today, Heligan is among the most popular gardens in a nation of flower enthusiasts and has helped revitalize the local economy.
In 1995, ready for his next project, Smit found a clay pit nearing the end of its working life in the village of Bodelva, in south Cornwall. “Horticulture didn’t seem to be taken seriously,” he later reflected, “and I wanted to make people think differently about our environment and relationship with plant life.” His vision was to regenerate the pit to create a symbol of optimism, showing that ordinary people could achieve the almost impossible when they worked together.
Creating the garden
The aim of the Eden Project was to tell the world the story of the plants that changed history. With £40 million in funding from the British Lottery, work on Eden started in 1995. The team decided to create the 90,000 tonnes of soil that they needed from local minerals and compost, rather than shipping it in. The site opened to the public in March 2001. Within a year, more than a million people had visited, many of them attracted by Eden’s claim to be “the eighth wonder of the world”.
This may be an exaggeration, but then Smit has always been a clever marketer. He says, “I’m a capitalist. I believe in the clubbing together of capital to create a wider benefit and profit. And I hate the way the environmental movement and a lot of political parties have not understood the nature of our economy and the need to create wealth.”
Visitors to the 35 acres of landscaped garden find two “biomes”, or giant glass domes, that house a huge collection of plants and animals, including butterflies. The two structures were based on the design of soap bubbles. One simulates a rainforest environment and the other a Mediterranean climate. Smit calls the biomes “a living theatre of plants”. In the “Outdoor Gardens” there are art installations inspired by topics such as climate change.
Modern Eden
At the beginning of 2020, the Eden Project was firmly established as one of England’s best-known tourist attractions. The year before, in 2019, more than a million visitors had walked through the park, bringing the total number to more than 20 million since it opened in 2001.
The impact of so many people visiting this distant corner of England has been substantial. It’s estimated that the Eden Project has contributed over £105 million (about €125 million) to the Cornish economy. Of the 2,400 companies that supply the project, more than 80 per cent are in Cornwall. As Smit explains, “If you want to be part of a community, you need to demonstrate you are part of that community.”
Much of Eden’s attraction lies in its gentle approach to educating people about the environment and encouraging greater understanding and empathy. Visitors will learn, for example, that the project became home to Europe’s second-largest redwood forest (after the Giants Grove at Birr Castle in Ireland) in 2016, when 40 California redwoods were planted there. The giant California redwoods can live for 4,000 years and reach 115 metres in height. The trees store more carbon per acre than any other forest type on the planet, making them strong weapons against climate change.
Like the redwoods, many of the almost two million plants on the grounds – everything from pineapple trees to the gigantic titan arum and 1,000 rainforest species – came from botanic gardens and research stations. Many others are grown from seed in the Eden nursery.
Smit says that while “Eden may have well been the product of my fevered imagination, the Eden you see today is actually the result of many, many people. When we began, it was a botanical institution with a difference. I used to say we were the world’s first rock and roll scientific foundation.”
The year 2020 hit the Eden Project hard, along with the entire tourism industry. Forced to close because of the Covid pandemic, Eden lost more than £7 million (over €8 million) during the financial year. In August, it was announced that many jobs would need to be cut so that the project could survive the crisis.
Lockdown and reopening
In December 2020, after the lockdown had been temporarily lifted, the site was closed after heavy rain caused flooding. The question of when it would reopen quickly became irrelevant as lockdown measures again took effect in early 2021, closing Eden until May.
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper a year before, in May 2020, horticulturist Lucie Oldale had compared the experience of working alone in the rainforest biome to the lone astronaut who, in the 1972 film Silent Running, maintains a greenhouse on a space station to preserve various plants for future generations. “Everyone is feel- ing isolated in some way,” said Oldale. “I’m very happy to keep the biome going for when visitors can return.”
Working with nature
Today, Tim Smit is 67 years old and a “Sir”, having received a knighthood in 2012. He remains the executive vice chair of Eden Project Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Eden Trust, which runs the operations of Eden. Although he’s no longer engaged on the project on a daily basis, he’s still involved in running Eden. He has also moved on to other projects.
In 2018, he bought Charlestown, a 23-acre, privately owned Georgian harbour near Heligan. And his latest project is the creation of outdoor leisure facilities he’s described, with characteristic enthusiasm, as “one of the most beautiful in Europe”. The site is a former golf course at Lostwithiel, also in Cornwall. Known as Gillyflower Farm, the project is planned to include an educational facility, orchards, a distillery, a microbrewery, a restaurant and 20 accommodation units.
Eden, however, remains a lasting love. At its opening, Smit said: “Eden belongs to the people. The whole point of the project is to highlight what we can do as a species, working with na- ture. Plants are used as a canvas on which to paint stories – human stories.”
In October 2021, the Eden Project hosted an event called “Leave no species behind – Half-Earth Day 2021”. The event featured the famous naturalist Sir David Attenborough and the renowned biologist Professor E. O. Wilson, from Harvard University. The host was Tim Smit, who says he’s proud of Eden’s success in changing people’s perception of the potential of science. Eden demonstrates that sustainability is about good business practice and citizenship values of the future.
But ask him why he has been so successful, and the businessman, artist and practical visionary is likely to smile. As he has said in the past, “Build in a bit of magic. Whenever you build in some magic, it will not only inspire people to come, it will inspire people to do stuff.”