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one day world trip: would you like to… take a walk in the humid tropics, enjoying a trip through the rainforests of the Oceanic Islands, Malaysia, West Africa and tropical South America? …and spend the second half of the day in warm, sunny holiday places such as South Africa, S.W Australia, Chile and the Mediterranean region? …all the while looking at how people manage the land to meet their needs and conserve the environment? Well, this is what the Eden Project, set in Cornwall, England, offers.
what: the Eden Project is all about mankind's relationship with and dependence upon plants. Much of our food, our clothes, our shelter and our medicine come from the plant world. Without plants there would be no oxygen for us to breathe, no life on earth. The way we treat plants and work with them is the story of the planet. Decisions we make now will materially affect the way our children and our children's children live and thrive (or not) on this fragile planet. The Eden Project is about education and communication of the major environmental issues of the day, always presented in an engaging and humorous way.
mission: Eden wants “to promote the understanding and responsible management of the vital relationship between plants, people and resources”. The idea is to connect or reconnect people back with the world they live in and empower them to enable them to work towards a sustainable future.
For this reason, in Eden’s 280,000-square-foot gardens, more than 100,000 plants are showcased representing 5,000 species from many of the climatic zones of the world. Many of these can grow in the mild conditions of Cornwall, but others demand greenhouses and that is where Eden's two gigantic conservatories come in. The Humid Tropics Biome - the world's largest greenhouse - is home to the plants of the rainforest - bananas, rubber, cocoa, coffee, teak and mahogany. The warm Temperate Biome is filled with the plants of the Mediterranean regions of the world - South Africa, California and the Med itself. Outside, sunflowers, hemp, tea and a host of other plants from Cornwall grow.
activities: Eden’s events programme brings together unusual and stimulating music, performance, workshops and talks. As part of its showcasing for sustainability, arts are used to make people experience Eden’s project: sculptors, automata makers, musicians, performers, painters, mosaic artists, weavers, dancers, stone-carvers, cartoonists... all take part in the effort to tell stories about humanity and the environment…putting champagne in the veins and challenging the grey cells!
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