Gardening at Eden: And How to Do It at Home - Hardcover

Matthew Biggs, a gardening broadcaster, writer and lecturer, trained at Pershore College of Horticulture and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. A gardener for over twenty-five years, he co-presented Channel 4's much loved Garden Club, stepped the other side of the camera to direct Meridian Television's highly successful Grass Roots and is a panel member on BBC Radio 4's Gardener's Question Time. Matt writes regularly for several BBC Magazines including Gardeners World Magazine, Gardens Illustrated and Easy Gardening, plus Amateur Gardening and the Royal Horticultural Society's magazine The Garden. His books include Matthew Biggs's Complete Book of Vegetables which has been translated into seven languages and What Houseplant Where? with Roy Lancaster. Matthew has also contributed to BBC Gardeners' Question Time's Plant Chooser and Techniques and Tips for Gardeners. Matthew has travelled extensively throughout Asia, Australasia and Caribbean and is fascinated by global gardening and economic botany.

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)
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