English garden of Eden is rolling in green.

Byline: Jay Clarke

ST. AUSTELL, England _ It looks like something from outer space, but the Eden Project is very much down to earth: It's a botanical garden, albeit one like no other on this planet.

Nestling in a deep crater under a series of huge, transparent domes, it is a stunning sight _ so unworldly, in fact, that the makers of the latest James Bond movie, "Die Another Day," used it as the site of the villain's headquarters. The movie, starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry, opened Nov. 22.

The Eden Project is also an unexpected, and unparallelled, success story. While London's superexpensive Millennium Dome laid a billion-dollar egg, the $130 million Eden Project in remote Cornwall has already garnered three times as many visitors as had been expected.

One reason for the attraction's broad appeal may be the way it is put together: Unlike other botanical gardens, the Eden Project doesn't attempt to show everything that grows under the sun but restricts its displays to plants that are useful to humanity That's a pretty broad canvas, to be sure, but it does enable the Eden Project to exhibit plants rarely, if ever, found in other gardens. A large stand of cannabis, for instance, bemuses many a visitor.

"This cannabis doesn't contain the drug found in marijuana; it's used to make industrial hemp," explains guide Martin Matthews. "But that doesn't stop people from snipping off leaves."

The Eden Project had to get a license to grow the stuff and erected barriers to discourage pot pickers, but the stalks nearest to the pathway all show evidence of surreptitious, if misguided, mini-harvesting.