How do you make economic botany interesting to teenagers? Who cares where coffee comes from? The Eden Project has reinvented how a botanic garden works, what it is for and who it needs to reach.

LUC was the landscape designer and masterplanner of the internal and external landscape at Eden, “the living theatre of plants and people”. We helped transform a disused quarry into one of the UK’s most popular visitor attractions and a leading educational botanical resource.

This involved bringing everything together into a coherent design, as well as solving technical problems such as stability and drainage. The resulting landform is sculptural to accommodate the scale of the architecture and designed to minimise man-made slope stabilisation.

While working on the project, we collaborated with a team of professionals, from horticulturalists and soil scientists to sculptors and artists. It was a dream project for a landscape architect, and we’re proud that it’s recognised as one of the most exciting projects of the last 100 years.