A popular newspaper recently published a set of weekly booklets featuring the gardens of the Prince of Wales's Gloucestershire estate. They included a meadow of wild flowers, being grown for scientific purposes, to prevent the extinction of the wealth of Cotswold native plants. Some of those in the picture were garden escapes - but so are many other plants now considered wild. As a lover of wild flowers myself, I could not but admire this venture, though I hoped that areas down-wind of the meadow would not suffer an excess of dandelions and other wind-blown seeds of plants more often known as weeds.
Have you noticed that every garden plant seems to have a weed that resembles it in the early stages of growth? Onions seem to attract horse-tails, spinach and many herbaceous flower plants foster dandelions, and strawberries disguise buttercups, both having long runners.
Swedenborg teaches that while we are on earth, our mind at the 'rational' level is balanced by good and evil influences, so that we can act 'in freedom according to reason.' Remembering also his teaching that gardens in the Bible picture our minds, we can see the use of weeds to keep our minds in equilibrium. And as we are all different, there is room for a lot of plants - and weeds.
So keep on gardening if you can, and don't despise the job of weeding. But when you have cleared a patch, and say to yourself, "I've done a good job today", beware: there may be a weed called 'self-satisfaction' creeping into the garden of the mind. Remember all good is from God.
"The Lord's Divine Providence causes evil and the falsity that
is together with it to serve for equilibrium, for relation, for
purification, and this for conjunction of good and truth." Divine
Providence 21 IX