Jo Readman has an important message. “The Eden Project is a theatre,” she says, “a platform where people from all over the world come and talk about working towards a more sustainable future”. Her job is to communicate this to the public, not the five million who are already paid-up members of environmental organisations, but the 54 million who are not. Her team uses story-telling, role play, art and poetry to put across its message.

When Tim Smit, Eden’s founder, asked her to be education director of “the world’s biggest greenhouses”, it was impossible to resist the challenge. “Jurassic Park meets Fitzcarraldo” is how she describes the place. She also believes passionately in what the project is trying to show: that it is possible to live and work sustainably.

Built on the site of a disused clay pit near St Austell in Cornwall and using soil from recycled waste, the Eden Project is a way of saying that change is possible. “Unless we can show what we’re doing in terms of social, eco-nomic and environmental regeneration, we have no right to even start talking about it,” says Jo Readman.

She has been fascinated by plants since her childhood (she was brought up on the edge of Exmoor). She has a doctorate in biochemistry from Bristol University, but left scientific research in order to teach horticulture to disaffected teenagers in Bath. She taught them degree-level photosynthesis and they were hooked, she says. She realised there was no barrier to learning, as long as she excited them and “started from where they were at”. Later she worked in television, producing organic gardening programmes for Channel 4.

“Teaching should engage children emotionally as well as rationally,” she says, “and encourage them to ask questions about the kind of future they want.” The same principles of engagement, interaction and discovery are evident in the educational programmes at Eden and in the new list of children’s books launched under the Eden Press imprint.

The Eden Trail, the new children’s guide to the project, takes the popular Plant Takeaway exhibit in the visitors’ centre as its starting point. Artist Paul Spooner’s automata display - sculptures which replicate life-like movements using mechanical devices - starts with a family breakfast scene and gradually removes all the plant-based materials - fruit, table cloth, chairs, newspaper etc - until the family are left naked and collapse from lack of oxygen, a state that finally afflicts the cat. The characters, Adam and Enid and their cat and dog, are brought to life again in the guidebook and lead the way through the biomes and the outdoor landscape, encouraging children to explore the extraordinary vegetation. Full of fascinating information, quizzes and activities, this book makes an excellent introduction to plants and their uses, as well as an illuminating guide to Eden.

The World Came to My Place Today, also by Jo Readman and illustrated by Ley Honor Roberts, takes up the theme of the interdependence of plants and people and shows how everyday household items come from plants from all over the world. There’s also an anthology, Poems from Eden by Annamaria Murphy, and The Revenge of the Green Planet, a pocket-sized paperback of astounding facts about plants.

Kate Petty, editor in chief of the Eden publishing programme, a division of Transworld, has more books planned. As author of Terrific Times Tables, Wonderful World and, most recently, The Super Science Book, she knows pop-up books can be used to convey powerful messages. The Global Garden, to be published next spring, uses simple mechanisms to show how plants work. And there will be two more picture books, one on the creation story by Jane Ray, the other A Children’s Guide to Wild Flowers by Charlotte Voake.

Wandering round the Eden Project, Kate Petty says she’s “bombarded with ideas for new books”. The Eden Press, like the Project itself, looks likely to keep on growing.

Order through Transworld’s agent, Bookpost plc. Tel: 01624 675137; or online at www.edenproject.com