Watching what happens in a garden with spaces left for Nature's offerings results in plants perfectly suited for the chosen location. Nature's thumbs - and all fingers - are green. So those plants, usually, reign supreme. Which accounts for how well the 'weeds' are doing in the midst of the brown grass. The ones I tweak out have incredibly long tap roots which explains why they are green and perky during the dry season: they're sipping from some deeper source. The ones I leave grace the garden with their vitality and beauty and I debate over some, those chummy with less adaptable plants: are they offering shade and shelter from the midday sun or offering too much competition for nourishment in the soil. If I can detach the mind enough the heart will direct my hands. I do delight in the ongoing patterns and textures and colors that the tweakings are adding to the ground between the bushes. They will gradually return to the earth and enrich it but for the moment they exhibit all the attributes of the verticals, now horizontals. The space between the bushes exists as spread-room to allow the Spanish broom and honeysuckle and lilac to grow to their full potential. But this will take time and in the meanwhile Nature has rushed into the vacuum with laurel shoots and tree saplings and peripatetic-seedy flowers and a platter-sized dandelion plant. And I have ambled into the vacuum with the tweakings.