The beautiful we miss
We miss so much beauty when fixated on the weeds, seeing only what we wish was not there.
It’s spring and bare branches are bursting at the seams with blossom and new leaves. Bees that have been mining the last flowers of winter are now falling into spring’s, emerging pollen drunk and dusted. The daffodils are done, the bluebells are opening, the buds of the snowball tree are tight, green and promising. The green is blinding. Everything everywhere is up, up, up. Especially the weeds.
Two years ago I stopped demonising weeds. I chose to see what was beautiful, at first in spite of the weeds, and then including them. It’s been a retraining, by degree, and constant.
Time and again I’ve found myself despairing at what, through the old lens of a planned and tended garden, seemed messy and neglected. So time and again I recognised that old way of thinking, and connected with my desire to be at peace with what lives here, chosen or not.
Today I see thistles and smile. The chaffinches love the seeds. Their prickly everything provides cover for tender seedlings to grow up underneath, safe from pukeko, possum and hare.
I see onion weed, here for its short spring season and I imagine the flowers topping my salads or battered as a treat. I plan risotto and and aioli and soup. Onion weed is more spring than spring onions.
Dock leaves make a fine tonic for the garden. They were outstanding in the labyrinth and their seeds feed the finches all winter long.
And the dandelion, whose spring leaves I eat, whose flowers feed bees and steep in my tea, whose seed heads carry the wishes of children. The dandelion; revered across ages, a protector of soil and portent of future forests.
How thin and paltry life is when we want only the curated. When we pick and choose what goes where; when we make no room for what naturally springs up. What a tiny sliver of time it is that a garden can be weed free—those few days after it has been cleared of weeds. What an effort to keep it that way.
What a fraction of our life we see value in when focused on what must change. How much we miss—all the ways nature and Life show off, show us what it can do, show us what beauty really is.
WOULD YOU LIKE READ to MORE ABOUT REWILDING?
What you experience instead is the fizzing aliveness of plants and animals, curiosity at how things naturally unfold, and magical combinations that we could never imagine nor contrive.