You know, inspiration is a funny thing. It doesn’t announce itself with a calendar invite, or wait until you’ve cleared your to do list. It just arrives – often at the most unexpected moment too – and if you don’t act on it it can quietly slip away.

That’s exactly what almost happened with this little video.

A Relic from the Archives

A while back I stumbled across a 1952 British Pathé newsreel called Miniature Gardens – a wonderful little film about Anne Ashbury and her pioneering work with alpine miniature plants in Essex. (I call Anne Ashberry the Godmother of the miniature garden hobby – she wrote several books about miniature gardens throughout her career.) British Pathé is an incredible archive of newsreels spanning 1896 to 1978, and this little gem is worth every one of its 90 seconds. Give it a watch:

Something about it grabbed me. The narration, the pacing, the sheer charm of it all. And then – almost before I realized what was happening – I had written a response script, swapped out the details for my own story, and record my own mockumentary version using old footage from my very first digital camera (circa 2004-ish?) I even mimicked the original voiceover myself, which is where the giggles come in.

It Almost Didn’t Happen

I almost didn’t do it. My own self-inflicted work load, being an overly creative solo-preneur, is often too much as it is. I almost said “I’ll get to it later.”

But as any gardener knows, later is always a gamble. You can’t plant in the wrong season and expect the same results. Inspiration works the same way – it has its own season, its own perfect moment. When the conditions are right and the soil is ready, that’s when you plant. Not next week. Now.

I had a rare surge of inspiration that day. I shoved everything aside and I made a window of time and space just to get the idea out of my head. So I jumped in. The result made me giggle then, and it still makes me giggle now. That grainy, accidental “70-year-old-film” texture from years of resaved files? Unplanned perfection – the kind that only happens when you let yourself play.

The Bonus on Acting on Inspiration Right Away

And, another bonus for acting right away on your inspiration? Whatever you’re inspired to do, I find gets done much faster, with much more clarity. It’s like that overwhelming inspiration delivered green lights all the way through this small project and it “got done” in record time.

So the lesson I keep learning: you don’t have to rearrange your whole life to honor inspiration. You just have to recognize when hits – if the season is right, ya gotta plant.

Spring is here. What’s your inspiration telling you?

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