Tell Me About Your Garden Series
Meditation on Matthew 13:24-30
First Presbyterian Church of Smithtown, NY
Pastor Karen Crawford
March 30, 2025
Thank you to the 15 gardeners who opened their hearts, homes, and gardens to me for my garden spirituality research for my doctoral program last summer and fall. May God bless you for your kindness!
Listen to the devotion here:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left.
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Yesterday’s weather truly felt like spring. I opened the windows and went outside to do a little spring clean-up. This is that in-between time for gardeners here, when we are still planning our gardens; some of us are growing seedlings indoors, like Reese and his heirloom tomatoes, and getting beds ready for planting, in another month or so. Betsy is ahead of some of us. She has already begun direct sowing of seeds in her vegetable garden: Swiss chard and lettuce, kale and collard greens, and peas and spinach. Soon she will plant her seedlings started inside: broccoli, cauliflower, and onions.
My spring clean-up includes removing fall leaves, old growth from perennials, and very carefully pulling up weeds. I say very carefully because it’s hard to know, at this stage, if what’s pushing through the soil is a weed or a flower that has reseeded itself.
It’s always interesting in spring to discover your plants growing in unpredictable places. Sometimes, wind or rain carry them there. Other times, it’s the wildlife that help with the transplanting. Sometimes, it’s just a mystery that stirs us to wonder and laugh. Gardeners Ernie and Reese shared about vegetables and fruits showing up in places other than where they planted them. Reese says, “I think there’s always a certain amount of ‘Wow! Look at this!’” He sees a cucumber plant growing up out of the middle of his phlox. “How it got there, I have no idea, you know?” he says. “And I think that sense of wonder is one of the reasons why I got interested in biology and science…And that’s really where all the early scientists were. They were trying to explain what God had done.” The Newtons and Galileos never took God out of the picture, he says. “They were trying to explain God’s world.”
This year, my Blanket Flowers and Black-eyed Susans are springing up between the bricks in our front walk. A landscaper pointed to them during his talk on how to kill weeds. And I thought to myself, “But they aren’t weeds.”
Which brings me to an important question. What is a weed, anyway?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lifelong gardener,“once said that a weed is simply a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered.”[1] Other romantics of the 1800s felt the same way—that “weed is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception.”[2] Weed became a symbol for “wilderness,” which was seen as a good thing. Naturalist Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s disciple, had different feelings about weeds when he planted his bean field at Walden, which, though it strengthened his attachment to the earth, led him to wage a war. “Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue, armed with a hoe,” he writes, “and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.”[3]
But what about in the 21st century? What do we think now? A farmer in Minnesota once told me that a weed is a plant in the wrong place. Grass is a weed when you don’t want it growing on your farm field. But the majority view held by crop farmers was that weeds were plants that might interfere with the crops. When I planted perennials at the manse next to the church in Minnesota, a farmer expressed disgust. They were weeds that would end up seeding his nearby farm field! I never thought of that. I was just happy that the black-eyed Susans survived a Minnesota winter.
Gardening writer Michael Pollan did some research on the plants growing as “weeds” in his yard. He says that weeds “are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don’t grow in forests or prairies—in the ‘wild.’ Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad siding… dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live… and hardly anywhere else.”[4]
He makes another interesting observation. Weeds are not wild, contrary to what the romantic writers of the 1800s assumed. “They do better than garden plants for the simple reason that they are better adapted to life in a garden…Weeds have evolved with just one end in view: the ability to thrive in ground that (people have) disturbed.”[5] If Thoreau had a field guide with him at Walden, Pollan says, he would have learned that most of his weeds were “alien species, brought to America by the colonists. St. John’s wort, daisies, dandelions, crabgrass, timothy, clover, pigweed, lamb’s quarters, buttercup, mullein, Queen Anne’s lace, plantain, yarrow… not one of these species grew here before the Puritans landed.”[6] America had “few indigenous weeds” because it had “little disturbed ground” before the Europeans arrived. “Tumbleweed didn’t arrive in America until the 1870s when a group of Russian immigrants (settled in South Dakota), intending to grow flax. Mixed in with their flax seeds were a few seeds of weed well known to the steppes of the Ukraine: Tumbleweed.”[7]
So, I am back to my question. What’s a weed? For me, it’s an unwanted plant, often growing invasively in my yard. I actually like some plants others think of weeds—such as dandelions and clover, which help improve the soil and attract pollinators. Last year, I planted Solidago—better known as Goldenrod—which is often confused with Ragweed and mistakenly blamed for allergies. Goldenrod tolerates poor soil and produces abundant nectar in its yellow flowers for hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies in August/September, when many other flowers are finished blooming. And it is deer resistant, which is important where I live.
But sometimes, a weed IS a plant that I purposefully grow by mistake. Have you ever made that mistake? The gardeners in our flock mentioned mint and scallions, I think. Evening primrose, a few years ago, was just a pretty, yellow flower that bloomed at night in my Ohio garden. The organist shared it with me, and I was captivated by it enough to take videos of the flowers as they opened, all at once, around 8:30 p.m. on summer nights. On Long Island, it grew like a thick impenetrable wall, about 7 feet tall. It still had pretty, yellow flowers, but the plant overtook and overshadowed every other plant on that side of the deck. Before the end of the season, I pulled the evening primrose wall down and threw it on a pile with my other discarded plants that were growing like weeds, if not weeds themselves.
So, what does Jesus think of weeds?
He has some strong feelings about them as they interfere with the crops that are feeding the population. In his Parable of the Weeds in Matthew 13, weed seeds are sown among wheat, which, along with barley, is one of the most important crops in biblical times; bread is a mainstay of their diet. It’s remarkable to me that Jesus’ attitude toward the weeds growing in the wheat field is much the same as the crop farmers whom I knew in Minnesota. Weeds intermingle with and contaminate the crops. It’s too dangerous to kill or pull the weeds when the crop is growing, lest the wheat is pulled and damaged. The weeds will be harvested along with the crop, before the weeds are finally destroyed.
Jesus will interpret his own parable, but only to his disciples, beginning at verse 37. He doesn’t say this to a crowd mixed with seekers, scoffers, and unbelievers. This teaching is to encourage his followers that one day, evil will end. As Paul says, our enemies are powers and principalities of this present darkness—not human beings. One day, Christ’s peace and justice will reign, when the Kingdom of God comes to fruition and the Lord comes again to take us to himself. But there is a time of waiting, for the Lord is patient and desires all to come to know him. Jesus says, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man;the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age (Matt. 13: 37-40, NRSVue).”
You might be surprised to learn that of the 15 gardeners whom I interviewed for my project, only one or two expressed a serious dislike of weeding. Many say that weeding is their favorite gardening task! Faith says, “I like being outdoors, and I like the physical activity, cleaning out the beds, weeding, watering, and getting down in the dirt.” Pat remembers fondly gardening with her father. Her primary labors: watering and weeding. Jolene weeds a little every day. “It’s peaceful pulling the weeds,” she and other gardeners say.
I had never really thought about it before, but I enjoy weeding, too, because it is up close and personal with the soil and plants. You have to pay attention to what you are doing, so you don’t pull up the plants you want to keep. But at the same time, I am not just looking at the weeds. I am listening to the birds. Enjoying the sun, the breeze, the blue of the sky. I am looking at all the new plants, and thinking how cute they are, with their tiny, unfurling leaves as they rise from the ground. I have hope. I am dreaming of what they will look like, in a few months, when the flowers are in bloom. I am remembering the people from my congregation who gave me many of these flowers to plant at the manse. And I am marveling at those that mysteriously end up growing between the bricks in my front walk. As other gardeners say, I lose myself and find myself in gardening. And when I go inside, I am a better person than when I went out. I am at peace with God, myself, and all Creation.
Yesterday, when I was weeding, I caught sight of some evening primrose that seeded itself in the front yard. They looked happy and healthy—and I decided to leave them alone and give them another chance. Maybe this time, it will be the pretty yellow flower that it was in my Ohio garden, a flower unlike most others because it blooms at night. If not, I guess I will be pulling down 7-foot stalks and chuckling to myself.
Once again, I am back to the question of what is a weed, and what does it mean to weed? Because if weeding brings us peace, and draws us nearer to the earth, over and over again, and helps us grow spiritually, then it can’t possibly be all bad.
Pollan comes to a similar conclusion. Actually, that weeding isn’t a bad thing at all. He says that weeding is “the process by which we make informed choices in nature, discriminate between good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. To weed is to bring culture to nature—which is why we say, when we are weeding, that we are cultivating the soil. Weeding…is not a nuisance that follows from gardening, but its very essence.”
Dear friends, as we continue our Lenten journey, I pray we will find time to be out in nature—losing ourselves and finding our true and better selves there. I pray that we will realize, more and more, how we are loved and cared for by a gracious and merciful God who doesn’t hold our mistakes against us. The Lord doesn’t see us as we might see ourselves as, I don’t know, the worst thing we might encounter while we are weeding: poison ivy. The Lord God who created us all in love, for love, sees us as precious and valuable. We are, to God, worth redeeming!
Will you pray with me?
Holy Gardener, thank you for caring for us and all that you created. Thank you for redeeming us through your Son, Jesus Christ. Thank you for reminding us that one day, evil will end, and that peace and justice will prevail. Teach us to see ourselves and one another as you see us—not as undesirable weeds, but as precious and valuable. Remind us that you are with us in the simple tasks of every day, including pulling weeds in a garden, and are ready to teach us more about you and your love and grace, ourselves, and one another with every breath that we take. Amen.
`
[1] Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (NY: Grove Press, 1991), 98.
[2] Pollan, Second Nature, 98.
[3] Pollan, Second Nature, 108.
[4] Pollan, Second Nature, 109.
[5] Pollan, Second Nature, 109.
Sharing God's Love and Grace 