Brave old world

Dinosaur time in a Saudi dome

Fancy a wander through a prehistoric landscape of mosses and ferns? Want to walk from the Devonian period 400 million years ago, all the way up to the pollinators of the Pliocene and the more familiar flora of today? Well, you’ll soon be able to – in Saudi Arabia, of all places. Its capital, Riyadh, plans to bring this timeline to life in the world’s biggest indoor gardens.

It aims to host the whole sweep of botanical evolution – with extinct plants represented as grey models, so you can even discover the flora that died with the dinosaurs. An undertone of sustainable morality will be hiding in the bushes of the present-day garden, where visitors will be given the choice of following a ‘do nothing’ path to an eerie dead end, or choosing other routes to a variety of botanical possibilities.

Work on the project is due to start next year, and should be completed in 2010. The Saudis have enlisted help from UK-based architects Barton Willmore, the Natural History Museum, and the Eden Project. The two crescent-shaped domes at the centre of their scheme will be five times the size of Eden’s bubble domes – but Eden Project founder Tim Smit is keen that this venture should not be seen as some kind of Arabian equivalent. “Eden isn’t about bubbles and plants, it is about attitude,” he told Green Futures. “To build an Eden in Arabia that was credible would require an Arabian response, Arabian architects, engineers, landscapists, storytellers, horticulturists and so on.”

Certainly it will be a huge feat of engineering, and with environmental challenges rather different from what Smit encountered in Cornwall. But some of its answers will be similar. Barton Willmore is looking into the possibility of using solar harvesting to provide energy to protect the microclimates from the extreme Arabian weather. The garden will also have an education centre covering different forms of renewable energy – while the water for the plants themselves will come from a nearby sewage works. – Alice Unwin and Roger East

19 September 2007

Roger East