Creating a buzz in the garden of Eden

Climate change and biodiversity decline are the biggest threats facing the world today. While data can leave us feeling disempowered and disengaged, at the Eden Project in Cornwall, we recognise the agency artists hold to provoke, captivate and inspire. Their work re-connects us to our senses, our bodies, our minds, to each other and to the world around us. 

We aim to embed creative and critical culture on-site at Eden, working closely with grassroots community programmes and world-leading artists and scientists to encourage creative practice, explorative thought, and to share human reflections on the ecological priorities of climate, biodiversity, extinction and their civic consequences. 

Our art programme sits alongside a thoroughly researched, cited and authenticated science, interpretation and education programme, which is implicitly factual, accurate and objective – but it serves a different purpose. It’s an opportunity to bring subjective human narratives back into the conversation and to provide space for reflection, and inter- and intra-personal provocation. 

Bees and biodiversity

One project involves bees. Bees and other native pollinators pollinate around one third of our fruits and vegetables, support farmers and growers, and enable the plants in our gardens and countryside to reproduce and flourish. They are essential to biodiversity; they underpin our food supply and very survival. 

Yet pollinator populations are plummeting, threatened by habitat loss, intensive agriculture, pollutants, invasive species and climate change. In the UK, 13 species of bees have been lost since 1900. A further 35 are under threat. Since 1945, we’ve lost 97% of our wildflower meadows. Without plant diversity, honeybees struggle to synthesise the enzymes they need to make honey and protect hives from infection. 

In 2019, with the support of Garfield Weston Foundation, Eden launched a three-year project, ‘Create a Buzz’, to share the story of UK’s native pollinators: their vital role, their current plight and their restoration. Underpinned by action, it was designed to conserve native pollinators and the landscapes they depend on, including scientific research, educational programmes, fieldwork on pollinator landscape restoration, community involvement, citizen science experiments and a major new artistic commission. 

Artistic response to research

As part of ‘Create a Buzz’, we invited the artist Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg to develop a proposal in response to our research. We connected her with expert botanists and horticulturalists at Eden, and our network of external pollination thought-leaders including Professor Dave Goulson. While developing her proposal, Ginsberg asked us: ‘Rather than designing gardens for humans, what does a garden created from a pollinators’ perspective look like, and how can we make one?’

Dr Ginsberg’s work examines humanity's contradictory relationship with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, her work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world.

Her proposal for Eden is a living artwork and will comprise a new garden, designed, planted and optimised for pollinators by using a specially designed algorithm (developed in collaboration with string-theory physicist Dr Przemek Witaszczyk) and a curated palette of plants. Horticultural apprentices and students will work with Ginsberg and our team onsite to plant the garden, along with local volunteers. We hope this intersection might foster new insight and inspire further research to illuminate challenges and solutions for the next scientific and artistic generation, in turn influencing public policy. 

Planting in the digital realm

The artwork will also exist in the digital realm. A website will empower audiences to generate their own unique planting scheme of locally appropriate plants for bees and other pollinators, using the same algorithm. Individuals joining in and planting their own gardens are able to co-create their own artwork at home, while actively contributing to pollinator restoration. No space is too small – a tower block window box has the potential to become a part of the artwork or a vast country plot. 

Our ambition is to expand the web function into a global platform for cultural activism. Working with partner venues across the world, Ginsberg and the Eden team plan to build international databases of local and native pollinating plants through edition gardens.

Google Arts & Culture and Gaia Art Foundation have now come on board as partners and supporters of the project, and we are in conversation with institutions such as the Serpentine Gallery in London and other international partners. 

As we look to establish edition gardens around the world, the artwork will ‘tour’ but not in the conventional way, there will be no shipping; instead, each garden will manifest as an idiosyncratic and local version, built from plants that are sympathetic to the native ecosystem. 

The project aims to raise awareness of the challenges pollinators face and solutions we can provide. We hope to share the onsite garden with over one million visitors and over 45,000 school children annually. Through the website, our own digital channels at Eden, and international edition gardens, the potential global engagement for this project is enormous. 

We hope to inspire people to think about, care for and take part in actively saving pollinators. I am excited that Eden will help bring to life a commission that offers the public agency in the face of ecological crisis, the opportunity to be creative and to make an environmentally positive contribution. 

Misha Curson is Senior Arts Curator at the Eden Project 
 edenproject.com