When you go to our £80m modern Eden, way out west near St. Austell in Cornwall, you will not be disappointed. The imagery is absolutely spot-on. Here is architect Nicholas Grimshaw’s botanical ark, nestling in a crater as if it were as much a lunar city as an earthly one. In cold terms, it is simply a pair of glasshouses, one larger than the other, one tropical, one temperate, set in landscaped gardens. They did this at Kew Gardens in the early 19th century. But of course Eden does not look anything like Kew, otherwise we would not all want to rush west - or east, if you happen to live at Land’s End - to see it.
Instead it is a sequence of giant intersecting domes, perched on and wrapping around the rocky terrain. In some light conditions, these mega-conservatories look like enormous iridescent soap bubbles. In others, like an insect's compound eyes. In others still, like clumps of macro-frogspawn or giant puffballs. There is indeed a not-so-subliminal filmic reference, but it is not to "2001". It is to the 1971 cult sci-fi movie "Silent Running", where the last remnants of earth's forests are to be found orbiting Saturn in glass-domed spaceships. The sheer unexpectedness of encountering such forms, rising from an equally unexpected and huge void in a hilltop, surrounded by sylvan fields and woods, is extreme.
And they milk the drama for all it is worth. The road into the Eden site does not take you straight to the wonder. It skirts the edge of the crater - formerly the Bodelva china clay pit - allows you teasing glimpses, finally deposits you at a scimitar-shaped visitor centre commanding the view of the magic kingdom laid out below. Then you make your way down, down, through a succession of new landscaped gardens, laid out in tapering strips like some surreal allotment, past a lake to the entrance - itself a sizeable butterfly-shaped building beneath a grassed roof. There, you turn left or right. And the adrenaline hit that is your first experience of the interior easily matches the drama of your first glimpse of the outside.
