There is a moment on the walk down into the Eden Project when the whole place suddenly opens beneath you.
Until then, it is easy to think of Eden as simply those famous bubble-like domes you have seen in photographs. Then the path bends, the trees thin out, and there they are: enormous white Biomes sitting at the bottom of a deep Cornish crater, surrounded by gardens, terraces and woodland.
The first time I stood there, I remember being more struck by the crater than by the architecture. It felt almost backwards. Here was this intensely green place, full of banana leaves, flowers and trees from halfway around the world, yet it had been created in a landscape that was once virtually lifeless.
That contradiction is really the point of the Eden Project.
Eden is not simply a giant botanical garden, impressive though the plants are. It is a story about what happens after damage. It is about whether a landscape can recover, whether people can change direction and whether something apparently exhausted can become useful and beautiful again.
That makes Eden’s new exhibition, Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet, feel particularly appropriate. Opening in September 2026, during Eden’s 25th anniversary year, it asks visitors to consider what humanity has already lost, what is under threat now and, importantly, what might still be recovered.
But to understand why that exhibition belongs here, you first have to understand the hole in the ground in which Eden was built.
A Garden Created in a Wasteland
The Eden Project stands near St Austell, in a part of Cornwall shaped for generations by the china clay industry.
China clay, or kaolin, has been extracted from this area since the eighteenth century. The industry transformed the landscape, leaving behind pale spoil heaps, deep pits and strangely sculpted hills. Cornwall’s so-called clay country still feels quite different from the postcard version of the county: less fishing villages and turquoise coves, more industrial history written directly into the earth.
The site chosen for Eden was the Bodelva Pit, an exhausted china clay quarry.
In the mid-1990s, the pit was nearing the end of its useful industrial life. It was roughly 60 metres deep, contained almost no usable soil and sat partly below the water table. It did not look like an obvious location in which to create one of the world’s most ambitious gardens.
That was exactly why it appealed to Eden co-founder Sir Tim Smit.
Smit had already been closely involved in the extraordinary restoration of the Lost Gardens of Heligan, another Cornish project in which a forgotten landscape had been brought back to life. His experiences there helped develop an idea for something larger: a place that would show not simply beautiful or unusual plants, but the plants on which human civilisation depends.
Tea. Coffee. Rice. Cocoa. Cotton. Rubber. Medicines. Building materials.
Plants that quietly sit behind almost everything we eat, wear, use and breathe.
The idea was to tell their stories in a way that made people recognise that nature wasn’t something separate from human life. It was the machinery keeping human life going.
And an exhausted quarry offered an unusually powerful stage on which to make that point.
Why Build Eden Here?
It would have been much easier to build Eden on a flat piece of land.
Instead, its creators deliberately chose somewhere damaged.
Standing above the Biomes, this starts to make sense.
If Eden had been created in an already beautiful meadow, it would still be impressive. But here, every tree and flower has another layer of meaning. The site itself demonstrates its argument.
A wasteland can be regenerated.
The original designs for the Biomes were sketched in 1996, and the architecture eventually developed by Grimshaw took the form of huge connected geodesic structures. Their rounded shape allowed them to adapt to the irregular contours of the former quarry rather than forcing the landscape into a conventional building site.
Creating the gardens was no small undertaking. Around 83,000 tonnes of manufactured soil were created for the project, much of it using waste materials. The overall cost of establishing the site eventually reached about £140 million, with significant support from the Millennium Commission.
Then, on 17 March 2001, the Eden Project officially opened.
It welcomed around 1.8 million people in its first year. Twenty-five years later, Eden says more than 23 million people have visited, while its wider economic contribution to Cornwall has exceeded £2.2 billion.
Numbers like that are impressive, but they don’t really explain Eden’s appeal.
Walking around it does.
Stepping Into the Rainforest
My favourite transition at Eden is the moment you enter the Rainforest Biome.
Outside, Cornwall might be grey, breezy and threatening drizzle. You pass through a doorway and suddenly your glasses mist up.
Within seconds, the air feels thick.
The smell changes too: warm earth, damp leaves, water and vegetation.
The Rainforest Biome contains plants from tropical regions around the world, and the deeper you walk into it, the less aware you become that you are inside a building. Palms tower above the pathways. Vines creep between trees. Water trickles through planted slopes. Somewhere overhead, the enormous hexagonal structure of the dome catches the daylight.
There are bananas, coffee plants, cacao and rubber among the collection: plants that connect this artificial Cornish rainforest directly to kitchens, shops and cupboards thousands of miles away.
That, more than any scientific label, is what I like about Eden.
You repeatedly find yourself looking at something familiar in an unfamiliar form.
Coffee is no longer a cup on a desk.
Chocolate isn’t a wrapper beside a supermarket till.
These things begin with plants, soil, weather, insects, farmers and ecosystems.
By the time I reached the higher sections of the Rainforest Biome, my shirt was sticking to my back and I was beginning to regret carrying a coat. It is an oddly effective lesson in climate: your body understands the difference before your brain has finished reading the information boards.
Then you step back outside into Cornwall and breathe cool air again.
A Different Mood in the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean Biome is calmer.
Where the rainforest feels abundant, unruly and almost overwhelming, the Mediterranean landscape feels brighter and more open.
Olive trees, citrus, herbs and flowers grow in dry, sunlit surroundings inspired by Mediterranean regions as well as comparable climates elsewhere in the world.
I found myself slowing down here.
That might have been because I was recovering from the humidity next door, but there is also something recognisable about many of these plants. Rosemary, vines, olives and citrus belong to landscapes many of us associate with holidays and food.
Again, Eden quietly links human pleasure with natural systems.
Lunch, agriculture, climate and biodiversity all sit at the same table.
And those connections are becoming more urgent.
Which brings Eden neatly to its newest exhibition.
Extinction: Renewal – Art of a Living Planet
Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet opens at Eden’s Core Building on 18 September 2026 and runs until 19 September 2027. It is included with normal Eden admission.
Created by conservation charity Explorers Against Extinction, the exhibition brings together sculpture, photography, film and contemporary art from 36 internationally recognised artists, including several newly commissioned works.
This isn’t a retrospective of environmental art tucked quietly into a side gallery. Eden describes it as a journey through humanity’s relationship with a changing planet, stretching from prehistoric extinction into possible futures.
The exhibition is divided into four connected sections:
- Extinction looks backwards at vanished species and ancient landscapes.
- Climate turns toward the environmental changes happening around us now.
- Community focuses on people living with those changes.
- Renewal considers conservation, restoration and the possibility of recovery.
That final word matters.
Renewal.
Eden could hardly have chosen a more appropriate subject.
Looking Back at What Has Disappeared
The first section, Extinction, travels deep into Earth’s past.
Among the works is a sculpture by Richard Deacon created using fossilised teeth from three extinct species. Emily Young’s carved stone work incorporates a hand axe approximately 600,000 years old, while David Nash has created sculptures involving pinecones dating back around 800,000 years.
Artists including Andy Goldsworthy, Conrad Shawcross, Julian Stair, Eleanor Lakelin and Michael Pinsky are also represented.
There is something unsettling about viewing extinction through physical objects.
Statistics about species loss can become abstract very quickly. Numbers become graphs, percentages and projections.
An ancient object is different.
It existed.
Something held it, grew it or evolved alongside it.
And now that world has gone.
This part of the exhibition appears designed to give extinction weight. Not simply as a scientific process belonging to dinosaurs and distant geological eras, but as a continuing story.
Climate Becomes Personal
The exhibition then moves into Climate, featuring work from environmental artists and photographers including Sebastião Salgado, Daniel Beltrá, Richard Mosse, Cristina Mittermeier, Ami Vitale and Paul Nicklen.
Photography is particularly powerful in environmental storytelling because it removes some of the safe distance that scientific language can create.
A phrase such as “changing ecosystems” feels manageable.
An image of a burning forest, disappearing ice or an animal standing inside a transformed landscape is harder to push aside.
And that is where art can do something that data cannot always achieve.
It can make us care before we have had time to argue.
The Eden Project has always understood this. Science is everywhere here, but so are sculpture, music, architecture, storytelling and theatre. Its approach has never been simply to tell people what is wrong.
It tries to make them feel connected first.
The People Inside the Climate Story
The Community section may prove to be one of the exhibition’s most important.
Environmental stories sometimes present nature as though humans are merely the villains standing outside it.
Reality is much messier.
People live inside ecosystems.
They depend on forests, rivers, coastlines, soil and rainfall. They inherit cultural relationships with landscapes. And when environmental systems change, communities often experience the consequences first.
Extinction: Renewal includes artists and stories linked with communities in Mongolia, Malaysia, Sudan, Iran, Papua New Guinea, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
Artists represented include Rashid Diab, Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Shaq Koyok, Gazellah Bruder and Tichaona Ncube. Their work explores resilience, heritage and people’s relationships with the natural world.
It expands the exhibition beyond disappearing wildlife.
Environmental loss is also cultural loss.
Why the Exhibition Doesn’t End With Extinction
The final section is called Renewal, and I’m glad it is.
There is only so much environmental catastrophe most people can absorb before they stop listening.
Fear can attract attention, but endless hopelessness eventually produces paralysis.
Renewal instead looks toward people restoring forests, protecting species and rebuilding ecosystems. Work by artists including Sophie Green, Gary Hodges, Emma Swift, Karen Laurence Rowe, Emily Lamb, Anne London and Luke Western forms part of this section.
The exhibition ends with a spoken-word film voiced by Sir Stephen Fry, intended to leave visitors with the idea that the future is not fixed and that humanity still has choices to make.
That feels very Eden.
Not cheerful optimism for its own sake, but something more practical.
Look what happened here.
Twenty-Five Years Later, the Quarry Makes Sense
Before leaving Eden, I walked back up the hill and looked down again at the Biomes.
From above, they seem surprisingly small against the enormous bowl of the former quarry.
That was when Eden’s argument felt clearest to me.
The landscape is not pretending nothing happened here.
The quarry walls remain.
The industrial history hasn’t been hidden beneath an artificial wilderness.
Instead, the damage forms part of the story.
In 1995, Bodelva was a worked-out china clay pit approaching the end of its economic life. In 2026, the Eden Project is celebrating its 25th anniversary as a living experiment in regeneration.
It hasn’t restored the landscape to some imagined pristine past.
It has created something new.
That distinction seems important when thinking about extinction and climate change.
We cannot always return landscapes to exactly what they once were. We cannot recover species that have vanished. We cannot reverse every change.
But restoration does not have to mean rewinding time.
Sometimes renewal means deciding what happens next.
And that is why Extinction: Renewal belongs at Eden.
You will leave the exhibition and step directly into its biggest exhibit: the Eden Project itself.
A rainforest growing where there was once no soil.
Gardens climbing the walls of an exhausted quarry.
Families wandering between trees planted in manufactured earth.
Twenty-five years of growth inside a place that once appeared finished.
If you’re visiting Cornwall between 18 September 2026 and 19 September 2027, I would allow enough time for the exhibition rather than treating it as something to squeeze between the Biomes. See the rainforest first. Walk through the gardens. Look properly at the old quarry walls. Then head into the Core and explore Extinction: Renewal.
I suspect the exhibition will make more sense that way.
Because the most hopeful thing about Eden isn’t the tropical forest, the futuristic architecture or even the millions of plants.
It is the ground underneath them.
Once exhausted.
Now alive.
Photo by P M on Unsplash
