A few days later, I went out to check and found dandelions sprouting in that exact spot instead.

At first I was disappointed. That wasn't what I had planned. But then I looked at them properly and had a change of thought. The audacity of it! The sheer, unapologetic nerve of a dandelion to grow exactly where it wants, regardless of expectation, regardless of whether it was invited. I found myself admiring them. Their tenacity. Their complete indifference to my plans. So I left them. Because as it turns out, dandelions are the first food source for bees in spring, they have medicinal properties that have been used for centuries, and in my opinion they don't deserve the name weed at all.

Doreen Valiente once said: "A plant does not need to be rare in order to be magical."

I agree with her. And yet we live in a world that is obsessed with rare. With perfect. With curated and filtered and polished until all the edges are smooth and nothing looks out of place. In this world of perfection, and the use of airbrushing and AI, it's hard to see what's real and what's not. It gives us a distorted view of reality and can give us the idea that we need to match what we see on our screens.

And most of us are scrolling through this every single day. Images of flawless skin and perfect bodies. Homes that look like they've never been lived in. Lives that appear to run without mess or struggle (or a dandelion out of place!). The trouble is, so much of it isn't real. AI can now generate images of people who don't exist. Editing tools can erase anything that looks too human. We are being insidiously fed a version of life that has been cleaned up beyond recognition, and somewhere along the way, without most of us noticing, it starts to feel like the standard we are supposed to meet. It’s no wonder that there’s a mental health crisis among our young people and so many of us feel disconnected.

But life doesn't need to be like that.

It's about the joy of the journey. The thrill of seeing the sun rise on a clear morning or hearing the first cuckoo (which I heard a few weeks ago, after 5 years of not hearing one!). The happiness which comes from a good cup of coffee, in a moment of calm before the day gets going. A catch up with friends that feeds your soul and you laugh so hard your stomach hurts. It’s about the moments that don't make it onto anyone's social media feed, but that you remember long after they've passed. Those are the ones that matter. Those are the ones that stay with us.

So maybe, to counteract this distorted reality, we need to be more weed?

As L.F. Young wrote in the Botanical Inspirations Oracle: "When life is not coming up roses, look to the weeds and find the beauty hidden within them."

Weeds thrive where they land. They don't wait for perfect conditions. They don't ask whether the spot is right, or whether they have permission, or whether they fit with what anyone else had in mind. They flower unapologetically and take up space in the most unlikely places and have a 'stuff it' attitude that I find, the older I get, increasingly admirable. I'm here. I'm alive and I'm going to bloom no matter what. Perfectly imperfect.


There is a freedom in that. In deciding that you don't need the right conditions to start. That you don't need to be polished or rare or anything other than exactly what you are, growing where you have landed, doing your thing anyway.

My dandelions are still there between the paving slabs. Bright yellow and completely unbothered. The bees have found them. The thyme never came, and I have got over that, in fact, I’ve even let the Rose Bay Willow Herb grow in the back of my borders, a plant also called a weed, but the bees are loving it!

Sometimes what actually grows is better than what you planned.

We could all do with a bit of that.

Sally x