In Pursuit of Spring
My final day on this epic journey from the Scottish Highlands into Cornwall had been planned as a failsafe - just in case spring refused to show its face. After coming across the daffodils and the blossom in the Quantocks, I needn’t have worried - although my baltic start in Scotland with -8 temperatures, frozen lakes and frozen diesel did not bode well.
Over 1000 miles later - and a difference of 23 degrees Celsius - I find myself in something close to nirvana - the Eden Project.
It feels improbable, standing here beneath these great biomes, to think back to the first days in the Highlands.
The journey south has been incremental, and yet here, inside a former clay pit the scale has shifted, and I’m thankful that even beyond these great domes of light the back of winter is broken.
I’m first into the Mediterranean Biome - gravitating, of course, to things that are ancient. I come across an olive tree from Cordoba that is between 600 and 1500 years old and begin to sketch it. Halfway through I start to wonder whether I’m even allowed to use wet media inside the biome - but I carry on regardless - and take a visitation from a robin as a blessing.
Moving between the biomes, into the Rainforest, I find myself thinking about the unseen. Beneath the soil of a forest lies a web of mycorrhizal networks - fungal filaments carrying nutrients, signals and warnings between trees - a subterranean intelligence binding individual organisms into a collective.
Over these last ten days I have travelled back thousands of years through the buildings and landscapes I’ve visited - Pictish stones - Norman arches - medieval graves - Roman fragments reset into later forms. Each place a compression of time and a gathering of wisdom inside. I begin to see a correspondence between those fungal networks and the latent memory held within our historic places. Beneath stone floors and behind carved timber - within wells, crypts and churchyards - something is always being carried forward into the present.
We step into these places and often do not know why we feel grounded. Perhaps we are brushing against that network of accumulated human meaning. A transmission across generations that surfaces as succour for people like me, moving through a winter of the mind in pursuit of something warmer.
But my final day expands the scale entirely. Back in the Eden Project, inside the Core building stands an 8.5 metre living sculpture of cyanobacteria - organisms that began producing oxygen more than three billion years ago - and without which none of this - olive tree, oak, Highland frost, nor Cornish blossom - would exist.
The sculpture, the luminous display behind it, and the Core building that enfolds it feel less like exhibition and more like revelation - a reminder that Britain’s architectural and creative wisdom does not end with stone and timber, but extends into systems, ecology, stewardship and, of course for me, the choreography of light around living form.
The network deepens. The correspondence widens. What I sensed in churches and abbeys - that layering of memory and form - finds its echo in biology itself. Life sustained not by isolation, but by exchange - by continuity - by collaboration across immense spans of time.
Weather: 13 degrees celsius. 20 degrees celsius inside the Tropical Biome. Overcast - drizzle.
Observations: Woodpecker in the Eden Project Gardens. Blessed Robin inside the Mediterranean Biome.
Total Miles Travelled: 1645 miles
"That aura, those echoes-the muted light is transporting. What a space to feel rooted in history. I'd love to make that journey myself; you've stirred the opera lover and architectural dreamer in me."
@sonatasips via X
"In reading & seeing Andy's work I always struggle to know which is more impactful - his writing or photos. In truth, the two combined are greater than their parts, he allows you to explore the importance of place and time from the comfort of home."
Peter from Bluesky
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