The Eden Project

Today we went to the Eden Project. This a little distance away from Charlestown so we walked about two and a half kilometres to the St Austell railway station and caught a local bus that takes you right to the entry. If you go there by train, bus, cycle or walk there is a discount of 10% on the entry fee. This is pretty common throughout England.

The Eden Project is a huge garden located inside an abandoned china clay quarry. As well as acres of outdoor gardens and landscaping there are two ‘biomes’, the larger one a rainforest environment and the other a Mediterranean environment. The biomes consist of hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal inflated plastic cells supported on tubular steel frames. From a distance they look like interconnecting soap bubbles made of bubble wrap. The architecture and engineering is pretty amazing.

The Project is basically an education and learning centre focusing on the interdependence of plants and people. The rainforest biodome is the largest green house in the world and contains thousands of species from rainforests in Africa, Asia and South America. It is hot, steamy and humid and explores how rainforests feed us and keep us alive. It has waterfalls, pools, and a forest canopy walkway The Mediterranean biodome is a bit cooler and drier like California, Western Australia, South Africa and the Mediterranean. It has citrus groves, gnarly vines, cacti, olive trees and wild flowers.

A third new attraction is The Core. This has an exhibition on ‘invisible worlds’ – things that are beyond our senses – too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too far away in space and time. It also has permanent and temporary art works –  as do the outside gardens.

Since it opened in 2001 this has been a huge visitor attraction and is a great day out. There are guided tours, five cafeterias and two large gift shops. This is not the traditional botanic garden with avenues of trees and a green house. This is much more like a theme park and zoo for plants with a food court and lots of interactive things to do. It is maybe a bit too ‘Disneyesque’ with bamboo jungle huts, Polynesian outriggers on a pond, adobe Mexican bell towers, etc. but it has to compete in a tough entertainment market.

After a few hours we were suffering from stimulus overload. This wasn’t helped by us timing our arrival to coincide with that of about fifty 9 and 10 year olds. Despite our best efforts we kept meeting up with them. Really, they were lovely, all so keen and eager, doing little drawings and filling in their activity sheets. The teachers were the ones who seemed to be stressing out over all the enthusiasm.

So a very good day out. For both of us The Eden Project has been on the list of places we would really like to see.