Eden Project

Richard Benson: sometimes I disagree with Eden

I don’t think you’re meant to just walk round Eden going, ‘Mmm, nice lemons, cool Biomes.’ You’re meant to think about it. Author Richard Benson on why Eden is such a challenge.

I know that on someone’s tenth birthday you’re supposed to say only loving things about them, but I can’t do that for the Eden Project, because sometimes I disagree with it. Not with its existence of course, you’d have to have no soul to do that, but with the arguments in its displays. If you read them properly, many of the points of view in the information panels are challenging to our behaviour towards plants and our natural environment; it’s a place with a point of view, and it sets out to change you, just as it once changed a clay pit in St Austell. I don’t think you’re meant to just walk round going, ‘Mmm, nice lemons, cool Biomes.’ You’re meant to think about it.

On my first visit in 2002, I interspersed my appreciation of lemons and Biomes with occasional mutterings to my mate about stories of plant husbandry that I found hard to believe. Of course I was wrong about a lot of it, some of it I’m still arguing about with said mate, but the point is that I’ve never had that feeling in other places dedicated to plants and our connection with the natural environment. There’s an energy and an urgency that make Eden interesting and exciting, and to my mind it’s this that is responsible for the truly admirable quality in the today’s 10-year-old Eden. It still innovates and experiments like it did when it was a reckless one-year-old.

Ideas like The Big Lunch (local get-togethers organised to strengthen communities), People & Gardens (helping people whose lives have been affected by disability to learn plant growing skills) and the Chelsea Flower Show gardens created with the help of prisoners and homeless people have shown that ‘using nature to heal and help people’ doesn’t have to be one those modern, trendy-but-empty phrases. It can actually mean something, and in the last few years I’ve heard the idea being discussed by several people involved in the regeneration of run-down areas. That is to some extent thanks to work that has been done here since 2001.

Of course the place is not just about using nature, but also about developing our appreciation of it. I’ve particularly loved Eden’s new night-time expeditions (right). Experiencing a natural environment in darkness always changes and deepens your understanding of it, because it challenges you to use the senses rather than relying on sight. When we can make out landscapes, silhouettes and moon shadows give new shapes to familiar objects. When we cannot see as clearly, we find ourselves more keenly aware of what we hear, both sounds that are specific to the night, and the small rustles and creaks that we screen out during the daylight.

Perhaps because we’re apprehensive in the dark, we become more aware of the complex layering of scents and the feel of the air on our skin as we walk past the trees that, to me at least, seem to be cooling the earth in the evenings, with their leaves whispering in night-breezes. Of course we all know that the smells, sights and sounds of the rainforest, like those of the English countryside, are different at night, but you have to walk through it and feel the mood of eerie tranquility before you really feel the truth of that.

Too often we think of natural environments as Beautiful Things to be driven to, inspected and photographed, and then forgotten when we leave. This is a mistake; think of a time when you felt happy in a more or less natural place, and you won’t remember only what you saw, but what you felt too. The people at the Eden Project seem to understand that, and that makes me look forward to the Project’s next 10 years. Assuming it’ll still be my mate, that is. 

Richard Benson is a journalist and author with a particular interest in the English countryside. His first book, The Farm: The Story of One Family and the English Countryside, was serialised on BBC Radio 4 and adapted for the theatre. Along with photos by Kevin Foord (above), Richard’s stories are part of an exhibition that’s currently touring rural Britain, Food and Farming: An Urban Perspective.

Find out how nature, from horticulture to wild play, is central to many of Eden’s transformational projects.

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Eden's 10th birthday, Experience

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Eden's 10th birthday, Nature