We are nature

The Eden Project began with an extraordinary act of imagination: looking into an exhausted clay pit and seeing the possibility that life might be encouraged to thrive there. Then came the equally extraordinary task of building the conditions to help it grow.

But the giant Biomes were never the end goal. They were a way to tell a much bigger story – about plants, people and our dependence on the natural world. About the systems that sustain human life and the part each of us plays within them.

Dr Jo Elworthy has spent more than 25 years working out how best to tell that story.

Before Eden, she was a television producer and writer with a background in science. Indeed, she first met Tim Smit while interviewing him about the pineapples (for a series called ‘Fruity Stories’!) he was growing at the Lost Gardens of Heligan (a 200-acre historic garden in ruins upon which Tim and his team led restorations starting in 1990).

Jo says that, five minutes after she told Tim, “I tell stories of plants and people,” he wondered if she would “give it all up” to help him create the Eden Project, asking, “What would you rather have written on your tombstone? ‘I wish I had’ or ‘I’m glad I did?’”

How could she resist such enthusiasm? “Suddenly,” says Jo, the “pit transformed in my mind into this theatre where thousands of people would come.” And what began as a leap of faith became a career spent shaping the way millions of visitors experience the natural world.

Today, Jo describes her job in terms that still owe something to her television days. “It’s like being the producer of this living theatre,” she says. “It’s amazing. And you see the audience every day.”

Education was central to Eden’s plans from the outset. The original concept included three Biomes with an education centre at their heart, but money was tight and choices had to be made. When sufficient funding finally arrived, Tim presented Jo with an option: they could build her education centre or use the money to make the main greenhouse even bigger. “Guess what happened?” says Jo, ruefully.

The greenhouses may have won out initially but, a few years later when the time was right to raise money for the education centre, Jo was grateful for the delay. The experience of creating Eden had completely expanded Jo’s sense of what might be achievable. “I was delighted because we did this extraordinary thing beyond all imagination, it really raised my eyes to the sky,” she says. “And I was like, okay, let’s just go for gold.”

Her ambition was for a building “the size of a spaceship”, spread across three floors but designed so that each level met the ground. Its form was inspired by the structure of a sunflower, which is not, as Jo points out, a single flower but hundreds of flowers giving up their individuality to create something greater together – a fitting metaphor not only for the Eden Project itself, but for humanity’s role in caring for the planet.