In Cornwall, near St. Austell, there’s a place called Eden. It’s a botanical institute-cum-themepark, both serious and silly, complete with a “morphing banana” in a glass tube, which can be “genetically programmed” to any shape. Though artist Paul Spooner’s primary sketch shows a man and his son molding the banana, in real life it is women who seem drawn to pushing this exhibit’s buttons!  

On the serious side, Spooner’s banana resides in one of Eden’s main indoor exhibits: the Humid Tropics Biodome, where it rubs elbows … er … roots … with endangered species such as St. Helena Ebony*, and various West African shrubs which are thought to heal prostate cancer. This, the largest conservatory in the world, is protected from the elements by a bubble of translucent, recyclable, self-cleaning foil stretched over steel girders. From the outside, it looks very much like a giant soap bubble blown in a puddle by schoolgirls.  

The Humid Tropics and its sister biodome, the Warm Temperate zone, are built in the bottom of the gaping earth-wound of a former china clay quarry. If you’ve never seen a quarry, let me tell you it is several stories deep, skyscrapers in reverse. The symbology is as easy as creating compost or buying organic--out of darkness, light; out of wreck and ruin, hope; out of a dying economy, employment. My life, too, now that it has encompassed Eden, has taken on a new vitality. All things are truly possible for those who believe.  

On the outside slopes of Eden, giant sculptures stand astride native West Country plants and flowers. One in particular, an enormous fly, as giant to humans as humans normally are to flies, put me in mind of an exhibit of African warriors I once saw at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Seems that in ancient Nubia, their highest honor was a medal in the shape of a fly--because flies, so tiny in comparison to their enemies, persist. A lesson I could use.  

But back to Eden, where, just as you would expect, two sculptures of the founding parents grace the gardens. Adam is metallic, with wild spiky hair and anatomical correctness. (The banana bends to the right if you’re curious.) Given man’s fascination with technology and tools, the cold steel skin seems right, the plow and the moveable rope that serves as either a primitive or extremely advanced machine for Adam to plow the soil. It just depends on which direction you’re coming from. (Adam was constructed by George Fairhurst, at the Penzance Drydocks, using shipbuilding technology.)  

Eve, the creation of brother and sister artists Pete and Sue Hill, does not stride but rather rests, contemplating forbidden fruit perhaps. She is a tertiary, literally planted in the earth, one with it. Her bones are carved from a tanalised timber frame, her muscles sacks of soil. Her hair is a hanging grass, (stipa tenuissima), her body covered with short, funky turf. (A.k.a. funkious turficus, the fine kind used for golf courses.) Her body looks so life-like I imagine her walking the grounds at night after the last Japanese tourist has purchased the last pot of clotted cream from the gift shop between the biodomes. Perhaps she visits Adam. Perhaps they pollinate the plants.  

There is poetry in this garden, staked out on canvas, between bamboo poles. A reminder that, as words and deeds are not irrevocably separate, neither are male and female, life and death, earth and machines, the beauty of creation and the ugliness of destruction, plants and humans. In the end, we all need each other.  

*St. Helena Ebony was thought be extinct for over a century until two plants were rediscovered clinging to a Cornish cliff.  

Author's Biography

Holly Chase Williams is a newlywed whose recent visit to Eden on her honeymoon was just too, too apropos. 

She and her new husband live in Spokane, Washington, where they are currently attempting not to make any of their friends sick with their "couple cuteness" while practicing their life goals of recycling and composting--a major challenge for Americans.

E-mail Holly at travelbug87@msn.com  

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