Eden by Tim Smit

(Bantam Press, £25).

THERE was only ever going to be one Millennium dome and it wasn't President Blair's useless monument to folly near to the heart of the capital that turned into a bottomless pit costing and is continuing to cost the country mega-billions.

The dome that seized the country's imagination was in fact two... biomes that were fashioned in a worked-out china clay pit in the furthest reaches of the land and they have been making money since the day they opened.

The Eden Project is the biggest natural history lesson the world has ever seen and it has turned St Austell, Cornwall, into even more of a tourist magnet.

Since March, this year, they have been heading there in their millions to gaze down on the structure that looks like something from a James Bond film set.

It is so popular that people have been asked not to visit on wet days and even as chilly autumn heaved into view, it was still such a crowd-puller that plans to build a third biome have been proposed.

The Eden Project is quite simply a living theatre of plants and how mankind is dependent upon them.

Under its massive greenhouse-like structures made from windows of interlocking hexagons, are temperate and tropical zones filled with flourishing plants that have mostly been grown under special conditions in Cornwall.

It's the eighth wonder of the world and it's the brainchild of Tim Smit, the man who awakened the nearby Lost Gardens of Heligan from their 70-year slumber.

Heligan is where Smit launches this fascinating insight into another of his projects to grip the nation. Someone who readily admits his early years were spent busking through life, Heligan is where he learnt that through hard work, ideas are turned into action.

It was in the spring of 1994 that Smit, in the company of his business partner John Nelson, and Philip McMillan Browse, a former director of the Royal Horticultural Society, began to discuss dreams of a giant conservatory at Heligan.

They became aware of a nearby stone quarry with a flat bottom, a terraced northern face, and talked excitedly about its potential as a modern Mediterranean garden, with ornate water features and a glass roof.

Smit relates it was this idea which took root in his imagination and that's where he kept it, until he could find a pocket deep enough to fund it...

In total, The Eden Project took seven years to come to fruition, it very nearly floundered and during the initial building stages it was almost lost under 43 million gallons of rainwater.

The book, like Eden itself, has a scale and a beauty of its own. It's a story of passion, triumph over adversity and Smit tells it so very well.

David Chapman