You might well, dismiss this as PR hype - as Heligan proved, Smit is a maestro at upbeat publicity. Then again, I've been at Eden before, sitting at a cafe table on a busy day as the cranes and workmen did their stuff down below, and seen visitor after visitor recognise Smit from his telly and newspaper appearances, and come up to congratulate him. Eden is seen as being good for Cornwall, an astonishing personal endeavour. I've not seen tears but I've seen people out on that viewing platform gasping with what looks like genuine wonder.

Smit is now onto the next thing. He wants to build hotels, conference facilities - there are none in the area. He wants to raise the money to built the desert biome he was forced to cut out early on. There's a place just waiting for it, beyond the lake. "It'll be like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I'd love to have a building that looked as if it was in mid-air, as if it's just about to fly out at you." He's been around the area with Grimshaw and the team, looking for other wrecked industrial landscapes to transform. He talks of a University of Cornwall, of new village settlements in the Cornish moonscape. There'll be branding of goods and services - he winces at the word "branding" but can't yet think of a better one. Eden will become an online broker for excellent and rare produce from small farmers around the world. And so on. When Eden opens, that is anything but the end of it for Smit.

Nick Grimshaw smiles in his reflective way when I mention his client's future plans. He's closely involved of course, but that doesn't mean he can't raise an eyebrow from time to time. "Did Tim tell you," he says casually, "about how he's going to build the new European capital down there?"