A brief essay on the weed garden

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

This is Gerard Manley Hopkins* providing evidence, I suspect, that he wasn't the one who did the gardening. Both Ella Wheeler Willcox, another poet: 'A weed is but an unloved flower'; and the great philosopher, Eeyore: 'Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them,'** support this perspective. But it is likely that, like Gerard, neither Ella nor Eeyore spent much time with a trowel.

Slightly more down to the soil, the remarkable botanist, George Washington Carver, said (in what could be a metaphor for his own life - check him out), 'a weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.'

Getting closer, I think.

The weed garden above is mine, and those pretty things in pots (I know the name of almost nothing) are self-sown. The pink things (they begin with v) came from the river. The ivy and nettle materialised out of the darkness on the second day of creation (yup, before dry land, the seas, and vegetation). When I'm in poetic/ philosophical/ photographic mood I'm quite happy to leave them where they are. After all, dandelions, daisies and buttercups have been doing lots of us blippers proud recently.

But I have discovered that weeds are fearsomely strong. They throw seed to the winds, burrow almost to the core of the earth and throw up canopies to starve other plants of chlorophyll. Japanese anenome tendrils can even push through concrete. Sadly, romantic neglect means gentler flowers are prevented from taking hold. Weeds are the evil empire with petals.

So, ultimately, I'm with the seer of everything:

Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry. ***

Genius, that man. How did he know so much? He didn't even have wikipedia.


*Inversnaid
**A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
*** The Bard, Henry VI Part II, Act III, Scene 1