‘You could dig up a lot of asphalt’: Tim Smit’s Chelsea garden prioritises growing food

Local councils should “rip up asphalt” to build community gardens so young people can grow vegetables, a co-founder of the Eden Project has said.

Tim Smit, who opened the giant biomes in Cornwall in 2000, has designed an “edimental” garden for the Chelsea flower show with the landscape designers Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis. The concept behind it is that plants such as cabbages and strawberries are beautiful but edible and should be placed alongside traditional bedding plants.

He hopes the garden, which will be exhibited at the show next week, will inspire people to grow fruit and vegetables at home as well as offer a template to organisations such as local councils.

Smit said: “When you look at towns, you realise you could dig up a lot of the asphalt and put up a lot of large growing boxes all over the place.” He believed this would encourage people to eat more vegetables and pave the way for farmers’ markets in town centres.

Tim Smit at the Eden Project, which he co-founded in 2000. It is estimated to have injected almost £2bn into the Cornish economy. Photograph: Ben Foster

As well as launching the Eden Project, Smit restored Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan, home to 300 heritage varieties of edible plants. He has been exploring varieties of fruit and vegetables that were common before commercialisation of crops.

Many are “on the verge of extinction”, he said, as they have been deprioritised in favour of species with higher yields or more resistant to disease. Smit claims to have grown a traditional variety of strawberry that “if you crush one across the top of your palate and let the juice run over your tongue, you’ll never forget”.

The Eden Project, which turned a sterile clay pit into a garden containing plants from all over the world under two huge geodesic biomes, is estimated to have injected almost £2bn into the Cornish economy. There are 8 hectares (20 acres) of outdoor gardens containing art and seasonal displays, and the attraction has had 25 million visitors since it opened.