The book every visitor to Eden longs to have – All the skills and knowledge of Eden adapted to inform the average gardener gardening at home.
When work on the Eden Project began in February 1999, the worked-out china clay pit of Bodelva in Cornwall was a grey ‘moonscape’ fifteen metres below sea level that contained no life and no natural soil. Today, the pit is home to one of the world’s most famous and diverse gardens, containing 130,000 plants from 3,500 species across the globe.
The seemingly impossible task of creating and managing specialist habitats from desert to rainforest in a sterile hole in the ground has given the horticultural team at Eden a unique experience of ‘gardening at the edge’. Now, in
Gardening at Eden, Matthew Biggs talks to the gardeners who have been with the Project from the beginning to discover exactly how they achieved the impossible, and how you can do it at home. As well as learning about the truly rare and magical plants that are grown in the diverse environments of the Eden biomes, we find out why the plants were chosen, how they are maintained and how they can be made to flourish.
If you’ve ever wondered if you could grow chillies in your back garden, how you could achieve the smells of the Mediterranean on your balcony, or how exactly to plant bulbs on a sixty-degree slope, look no further. Packed with tried and tested tips and techniques covering all aspects of global gardening from design and soil to propagation and pest control, this book shows us how everyone can garden ‘the Eden way’.
Author Biography
Matthew Biggs, a gardening broadcaster, writer and lecturer, trained at Pershore College of Horticulture and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. A gardener for over twenty-five years, he co-presented Channel 4's much loved Garden Club, stepped the other side of the camera to direct Meridian Television's highly successful Grass Roots and is a panel member on BBC Radio 4's Gardener's Question Time.
Matt writes regularly for several BBC Magazines including Gardeners World Magazine, Gardens Illustrated and Easy Gardening, plus Amateur Gardening and the Royal Horticultural Society’s magazine The Garden. His books include Matthew Biggs's Complete Book of Vegetables which has been translated into seven languages and What Houseplant Where? with Roy Lancaster. Matthew has also contributed to BBC Gardeners' Question Time’s Plant Chooser and Techniques and Tips for Gardeners.
Matthew has travelled extensively throughout Asia, Australasia and Caribbean and is fascinated by global gardening and economic botany.
Reviews
The book is loaded with gorgeous photographs of exotic plants . . . Biggs's advice on how to duplicate Eden plantings in your own garden contains information on composting, growing and pest control.
