Fiona Veitch Smith

A Gardener’s Gospel – Week 12

This week I managed a bonus day in the garden. After weeks of on-off rain, sleet and snow, I woke on this mid-April Tuesday to glorious sunshine. Tuesdays are my day off – well, from the paying job anyway. I’m still a mother and housekeeper and Tuesdays are spent shopping and spending time with my three-year-old daughter. But on a day like this, shopping was for the birds.

So with Megan set up with a trowel, digging a hole for some kitchen-raised chives that I was releasing into the wild, I surveyed my little kingdom. With the ‘bairn’s’ attention span only likely to last an hour at the most, I decided that my top priority would have to be weeding.

Murder on my mind

I turned towards the healthy crop swaying smugly in the breeze. I smiled at them sweetly and said: ‘Die you bastards, die!’ then hacked, pulled and prised until the last of them lost its will to live. I scraped up their corpses and tossed them in a bin bag, then shook off the last of their entrails from my gloves.

It was then that I noticed a strange seedling staring at me in terror from the shade of some Dutch Lavender. Now dandelions and daisies I know; I’ll throttle them at the drop of a spade, but this scrawny little impostor was new to me. The question was, was it really a weed? Last season I had planted a selection of spring and summer seedlings but unfortunately, the Hound from Hell had broken in and dug up the flower bed before they were established. She had also chewed the little markers I’d left to remind me what I had planted.

An identity crisis

So this little chap could be a survivor or simply a chancer. Would I give him the benefit of the doubt? In the Bible there’s a verse that says: ‘By their fruit you will know them,’ (Matt 7:20) but in this case, it would be by their flowers. I decided to leave him. In a couple of weeks I’ll check back and see if I can finally figure out what it is.

There’s another story in the Bible, told by Jesus, about a man who planted wheat in his field; but a while later his servant went out to see that weeds had sprung up among the wheat. He told his master and asked him if he should pull out the weeds and burn them, but his master said that if he did that he might pull out the good plants with the bad. ’Leave them’, he said, ‘until the harvest, then we can separate the two’. (Matt 13:24-30).

The usual suspects

There are different kinds of weeds in my life. Some are obvious: selfishness, greed, bitterness and a judgemental spirit. When I spot these, I must pull them up immediately. Fortunately, their roots are not very deep, yet they come back season after season. If I leave them for any length of time they will spread so far that the beautiful flowers in my garden will be overrun. However, after a good session of weeding and confession, my healthy plants have space to breathe and grow.

A rare breed

But there are other kinds of weeds that are more deep-rooted and unusual. They’ve been under the surface for many years and surprise me when they first appear. Sometimes I’m not even sure if they are weeds – I name them hurts, fears and emotional wounds. Just last week, one of these surfaced. My husband thoughtlessly criticised my pronunciation of something and I burst into tears. I was thrust back to my childhood when my family first moved to South Africa and I was teased mercilessly for my Geordie accent. But after years of speech and drama and living among people who spoke differently, my accent changed. When I returned to Geordieland as an adult, they didn’t even know I was one of them – which caused a different kind of hurt, but more of that later.

When the time’s right

After that chance remark and surprise reaction, I poured out my pain to God. Why was it that He had not dealt with it years ago? The fact is, sometimes it’s kinder and wiser to leave things until we’re mature enough to deal with them. That time was now. Of course, there are other times when God puts his finger on something in our lives but we refuse to allow him to heal it, or we just cut it off at the surface and leave the root. Beware of these weeds. They will go back underground and strangle you slowly from within.

Beware the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.
Song of Solomon 2:15

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