Worked-out mines were often regarded as scars on the landscape; their only legacies were pollution and unemployment. But this is changing. Around the world, these barren landscapes are being transformed. Waste tips have been turned into ski slopes, sculpture parks and vineyards. Former mines are being used to store seeds, data, and even cake, and a surprising number of gardens have been created in quarries. Yet, while quarries might appear to offer a blank canvas, they also bring plenty of challenges.
You may also like
- The top horticultural organisations to support
- Was 2024 the worst year for growing and gardens?
- How to protect grass seed from birds
- 25 brilliant English gardens to visit
Below is an edited extract from The Eden Project’s new book, 102 Things to Do with a Hole in the Ground, by Peter Whitbread-Abrutat and Robert Lowe, which explores the weird and often wonderful things that can be done with former mining sites.
SQUIRREL_13134440
Four remarkable gardens created from a hole in the ground
The Eden Project, UK
It’s hard to imagine a place less suited for the site of a botanic garden than a 160-year-old worked-out Cornish china clay mine, but in the 1990s, Tim Smit (now Sir Tim) and a team of experts came up with the idea to create a global garden dedicated to the plants that had shaped human history in Bodelva pit near St Austell - the Eden Project.
It was essentially a blank slate: there was no contamination to remediate, but there wasn’t any soil either. A team of scientists at the University of Reading and from the Eden Team blended silica sand waste from the china clay industry and composted bark and green waste into six recipes to cover the different planting areas of the site.
Today, just over 11 hectares of diverse gardens now grow where little could. There are orchards and allotments, crop displays and sculptures, as well as pockets of wild landscapes from around the world, including American prairies and South African veld – and beyond all this are the Biomes.
The Rainforest Biome is home to thousands of the world’s rainforest plants – from the exotic to the workhorses that we take for granted, like chocolate, sugar and bananas – and exhibits that reveal the biodiversity rainforests support and their role in creating our weather. The Mediterranean Biome features the plants from the Mediterranean Basin that shaped civilisations, like olives and vines, as well as rare and resilient plants from the region and three of the world’s other Mediterranean climates: California, Southwest Australia and South Africa. Throughout, the Eden Project emphasises the positive stories of resilience and regeneration.
Bamburi Haller Park, Kenya
Once a barren, rocky wasteland, Bamburi Haller Park is now a lush tropical forest full of life. The park was the creation of Swiss-born René Haller, who persuaded his employer, the Mombasa Bamburi Cement company, to let him regenerate their vast limestone quarries on the Kenyan coast in the sixties.
It was no small feat. Only centimetres above saline groundwater, the site was compacted and infertile. Haller chose to work with the grain of nature. He used a combination of casuarina trees – native to Australia but naturalised along the East African coast – and thousands of millipedes to begin its transformation. A million trees were planted over a decade including mahogany, mangroves and coconut. Haller enlisted bushpigs, hippos, eland antelopes and even giant tortoises to help manage the forest and its brackish lakes while birds and velvet monkeys swiftly took advantage of the new habitat that had appeared.
Bamburi-Haller Park opened in 1984, and today, over 150,000 people visit the park every year. It features tropical forest gardens, reptile and butterfly displays, and an orphanage for rescued animals.
Nochten Boulder Park, Germany
Beneath the clouds billowing from the cooling towers of the Boxberg lignite power station sits a garden with a difference: at the Nochten Boulder Park, fashioned from the scars of mined land, itinerant boulders rather than plants are the real rock stars.
Several kilometres of gravel paths and trails wind through the 20-hectare Park, which includes both formal gardens and planted heathland. There are over 7,000 boulders among the 100,000 plants at the park. The rocks’ different colours, patterns and textures have enabled geologists to pinpoint where they emanated from – and it’s further away than you might expect. The boulders had travelled hundreds of miles from Scandinavia during the last Ice Age, their positions in the park revealing the direction of ancient ice flows. These fragments of deep time then rested beneath the earth until the excavators of the Nochten opencast mine brought them to light.
Butchart Gardens, Canada
Originally a limestone quarry, the transformation of Butchart Gardens began in the early 1900s. Like many of her neighbours at the time, Jennie Butchart, the wife of a cement manufacturer, commissioned Isaburo Kishida, a visiting garden designer, to create a Japanese garden on the estate. As soon as the limestone was exhausted, Jennie set to work creating more gardens. The quarry was filled with topsoil and a bed created from the rock debris to create the tranquil Sunken Garden. Its gloomy grey rockface was masked by ivy prodded into their crevices by Jennie, seated precariously on a bosun’s chair. Before long, the surrounding land succumbed to Jennie’s vision, and that of her successors, and Butchart now boasts a Rose Garden, an Italian Garden and a Mediterranean Garden.
In 2004, the Indigenous people of the area were acknowledged with two totem poles carved by master carvers of the Tsartlip Nation and Tsawout Band. The gardens are still owned and managed by the Butchart family, and their ‘old quarry’ is visited by a million people every year.
Robert Lowe is the co-author of 102 Things to Do in a Hole in the Ground, out now, priced at £14.99 and published by the Eden Project.
SQUIRREL_13134440