The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
-- C.A. Swinburne, A Forsaken Garden
Gardens began as necessities -- a way to cultivate food and stave off starvation. They grew to encompass ornamentals from the local area. Soon they grew to encompass ornamentals from other locales. That was our error. For a while there was beauty and utility here. And then there was chaos.
Unlike humans, plants are all essentially good. Even the ones that we call weeds have their purposes; many have medicinal properties; others use their root systems to control erosion; some are food crops whose essential properties have been forgotten by most people. Plants, even weeds, do not sit around in dark meeting rooms plotting violence; if they bear arms, it is only in self-defense. Thorns and spines thwart casual grazers, poisons warn away even hungry predators. These weapons are only a way of saying, "these leaves, this bit of land are my property, my rights." They turn these weapons on the human species only when we threaten them with plucking or pesticides.
So plants, left to themselves, do only what nature created them to do, devoid of malice or evil intent. They are the innocents in the garden of good and evil.
But leave them alone in your yard without any form of control and nature becomes anarchy, which soon becomes chaos.
The annuals will immediately seed themselves about, heedless of territoriality. This year's six pack could be next season's 600, most of whom, will have escaped their allotted portion of the garden and jumped into beds with other plants, without any regard for the compatibility of their new partners. The perennials, having no respect at all for personal space, will spread into their neighbors' area, their roots twining together in hopeless snarls that all too soon become death grips. The laissez-faire gardener, believing that nature knows best, allows this to happen. And for a while, it appears that it all working out. For a while, the garden is full and lush, abundant in color and scent. And the gardener has spent neither money nor time in its pursuit. All appears peaceful, bounteous, and effortless, even if the colors hint at discord.
And discord abounds. If gardeners looked beneath the surface, they would see that the plants have formed an underground network. They threaten each other with strangulation. One, greedier than the others, robs the soil of nutrients and leaves its neighbors to starve. The weaker members of the tribe have allowed aliens to creep into the bed -- aliens who by their very vigor and stealth now threaten all the legal inhabitants. No respecters of property rights, they bound their way through the beds and fight to the death for what little space and food remains.
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