This massive coffee-table book documents the Eden Project, a megabotanical garden with the biggest “Biomes” (greenhouse domes ) in the world (“for who would want to visit the second-largest?”) built in a barren clay pit in Cornwall, England. Former record producer and Eden promoter Tim Smit describes its genesis: “we had the idea to build... giant conservatories which would tell the story of human dependence on plants.” With an intent to “interpret what wildness looks like and then to explore its domestication,” Biggs (Matthew Biggs's Complete Book on Vegetables
) focuses on two climates: the humid tropics, site of “the first human adaptation to the wild in its early domestication,” and the warm temperate, “relevant to the birth of Western civilization,” and also including regions in South Africa, California and the Mediterranean. The book is loaded with gorgeous photographs of exotic plants, like the stinky, extravagantly phallic Titan arum, lush meadows of prairie flowers as well as the more pedestrian potatoes and apples—and, of course, glimpses of the soap bubble–like Biomes. Biggs's advice on how to duplicate Eden plantings in your own garden contains information on composting, growing,and pest control, but much of it will not be new to gardeners, although tips about growing exotic plants such as yardlong beans and bitter gourd and tidbits like the history of the sweet pea are intriguing. American readers are apt to be flummoxed by Anglicisms such as temperatures given in centigrade. (July)
