The beginning
Sculpting the landscape for one of the most ambitious gardens ever conceived was no mean feat.
Photographed in October 1995 before development of the Eden site started. St Austell Bay can be seen in the background.
The vision of the first horticultural directors of Eden, Philip McMillan Browse and Peter Thoday, was to re-create the major elements of the world's floras and to integrate within that re-creation a concentration on people's relationship with plants.
The fact that the site we used for doing all this was a china clay pit coming to the end of its working life is of course an important part of the Eden Project story. It is one thing to build a garden to display the diversity and riches of the world, but doing so in the large, soil-less rainwater-sump that was Bodelva was probably one of the biggest horticultural challenges ever undertaken.
Dominic Cole of Land Use Consultants was faced with the huge challenge of creating a landscape appropriate to Eden's remit. Inspired partly by the patternation of allotments and the need for land stabilization, he created large swathes of planting reminiscent of contour ploughing, a unique vision of land use.
