Heaven really is a place on earth

Friday, July 06, 2012

Tim Smit will be in Kinsale to talk about Eden, his plant project that blossomed in a Cornwall clay pit, writes Richard Fitzpatrick

TIM SMIT, the man behind the Eden Project, or what the New York Times has dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world”, spoke at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in Britain last year. Mareta Doyle, chairperson of the Kinsale Arts Festival, approached him after his talk.

“She mugged me,” says Smit. “She said to me, ‘You’re going to be speaking in Kinsale’. I said, ‘Pardon?’ She said, ‘Yes, you’ll be speaking in Kinsale. I will invite you and you will come’. I wasn’t really given an option to be honest. She is a bit of a force of nature.”

The pitch appealed to Smit’s can-do, entrepreneurial streak. His name is one of the most interesting on the bill at Kinsale Arts Festival, where he will have a discussion with his friend and West Cork resident David Puttnam, the film producer whose credits include The Mission and Midnight Express.

Smit’s story has resonances for an Irish audience in the midst of a recession, and for an island that wonders what can be done with its derelict land. He was born in Holland in 1954, but educated in England, concluding his studies with a degree in archaeology and anthropology at Durham University.

After a 10-year stint as a composer-cum-producer in the music business, in which he worked with such stars as Barry Manilow and the Nolan Sisters, he retreated to Cornwall.

Down the road from his dwellings, Smit stumbled upon the Tremayne family gardens, which had fallen into neglect after the First World War. Even though the only thing he knew about plants at the time was that they “grew greenside up”, he resurrected the 1,000-acre site.

“When I cut my way into the gardens, I just fell in love with them,” he says. “They were gorgeous — the atmosphere of them and the gentle melancholy. Their lostness was like sleeping beauty. I’d only been inside 45 minutes when I decided I was going to change my life and restore them.

“If you love something there will be millions of other people that love it, too. The only issue is marketing. I called them The Lost Gardens of Heligan. Everybody said, ‘How beautiful that sounded.’ I said, ‘Yip, that’s what we’ll call them’. No one had ever done that before with gardens — given them a name other than where they were.”

Smit persuaded the BBC to do a documentary on the revival project which helped draw public interest. The gardens were on their way, and out of them came the idea for the Eden Project, an audacious plan he cooked up in 1995 to transform a disused pit in Cornwall into a giant tourist garden.

Smit’s idea was simple. He wanted to tell the story of plants to people. He constructed the world’s two largest greenhouses as his set, the pair of domes, which people have remarked look like soap bubbles, being big enough to cover 29 football pitches.

The site he chose was a 160-year-old china clay pit which couldn’t grow a single thing and was 15 metres below the water table. He ferried in 80,000 tonnes of green waste. The temporary scaffold used in construction was so large it made the Guinness Book of Records.

The Eden Project opened on St Patrick’s Day, 2001, the date being chosen as a thank you to Irish man Jerry O’Leary and his crew for their heroic excavation work. Since then, it has brought over £1bn into the Cornwall economy. It operates as a charity, and is home to over a million plants. with additional space for activities like rock climbing and music festivals. Eden has attracted over 13 million visitors (who get a discount for arriving by foot, on bike or by bus).

“My insight,” he says, “was that if you tell scientific stories with language that you’d use at night in a bar people are fascinated. We have storytellers on site, about 20 people who go around gathering people together to tell stories. In the summer months, we gather thousands of poles and bits of plastic and canvas and rope and we do den building. We have maybe 40 or 50 people helping members of the public build tents and shelters. The public adore making dens.

“You don’t see lots of plant labels like tombstones at Eden. We don’t collect two of these, two of those, two of the other. We’re not like a stamp collection. We reproduce as well as we can what it would be like to be in a rainforest so you’ll see lots of things repeated because you’d get lots of things repeated in a rainforest as well as huge diversity.

“Then you might find a clearing where someone might be making a canoe, then suddenly you’d come upon a complete Malaysian house with everything in it, absolutely everything you’d expect to find in a house in Malaysia. In fact, the only thing that we got wrong with our Malaysian house was that it didn’t have a poster of Manchester United because they are absolutely Manchester United fanatics in Malaysia.

“We wanted to create a sense of theatre. I thought imagine building a place that was like somewhere you’d fantasised about in childhood, an Arthur Conan Doyle world, where you’ve come across a civilisation in the crater of a volcano, and it’s so spectacular that even the cynics for a moment have their jaws drop.”

* Tim Smit will appear at the Kinsale Arts Festival, 5pm, Sunday, Jul 8. For more information, visit www.kinsaleartsfestival.comHome