We were delighted to read Alys Fowler’s piece (How I learned to love weeds – and why you should, too, 16 March). On our allotment and in our garden, we have learned to see these plants not as the relentless enemies of old, but to respect and admire the way that the soil just seems to love them and helps them to thrive. In the gardening club we run at our local school, we always showed them in a “know your enemy” kind of way, but this has turned into a celebration of their beauty and vitality.
That reverend gentleman Gerard Manley Hopkins got this so right in his poem Inversnaid: “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.”
Nice one, Alys. We still hoick out the weeds where we have to, but otherwise leave them to grow happily – we know they’ll still be there when we’re long gone, pushing them up.
Rev Roman and Kate Kukiewicz
Rayne, Essex
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