Life Lessons From The Garden: Dead Heading Is A Good Idea

I am a gardener at heart and have always loved a garden of any kind.  I love flower gardens and vegetable gardens. I love structured, everything-in-it's-place gardens. I love gardens that are lush and wild and out of control.

I'm a learn-as-you-go and do-what-seems-like-the-right thing to do kind of a gardener.  This means that I don't really read up much on HOW to garden so much as I just try it out and see how it works. Here's an example of what I mean: for years I didn't even know what dead-heading was much less that it was a necessary part of gardening. If anything, I thought it had something to do with The Grateful Dead rather than gardening.  I've since learned that it's important to trim dead flowers off plants so that they can put their energy into producing new ones.  Not only does it make the plant look better, it ensures new growth. 

Dead heading is an important concept for life as well as gardening. I've been taking a hard look at what I'm doing that is productive and worthwhile and what I'm doing out of habit that takes my energy and does not produce results.  Do you have things like that in your life?  This means that I am eliminating old things and making way for new. Just like in gardening, I'm trying out new ventures and doing what seems like the right thing.  An example of this is a recent addition of a destinations column that I'm writing for Sixes Community Living magazine.  It seems like a great opportunity to write AND do something else I enjoy which is experience new locations and activities. In anticipation of writing the monthly column, I visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens to see the current exhibit, Imaginary Worlds:  Plants Larger Than Life.  It was  one of the most incredible exhibitions I've ever seen of mosaiculture (another new word that I've learned). There are nineteen extraordinary living sculptures made of up over one hundred thousand plants.  It was so unbelievable that words can't do it justice so let me share some amazing pictures:

 

 

Each one of these creations was first built with steel and covered with a special fabric before throusand of plants were inserted one by one into the sculpture.  It is a mosaic of plants!  Aren't you just blown away with these creations?  I was and so was everyone else visiting the garden.  Here's the lesson learned though:  If I hadn't tried something new, I wouldn't have been browsing the internet looking for what was happening at local gardens and I wouldn't have found this exhibit.  It happened because I dead headed old unnecessary tasks out of my life and took on something new and challenging.  Writing a column on destinations is the perfect excuse to explore and discover new things.

What about you?  What do you need to eliminate from your life?  What opportunities are right under your nose that you could uncover?

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