Metaphoring it up

This week I've been thinking a lot about the importance of gentleness, as well as expressing your love to people by offering them free will (of course they already have it, but sometimes we try to act like they don't and that we are in charge of them). What I'm about to write will relate more to gentleness than free will. I'll save free will for another time.
Yesterday I was weeding around some flowers that I planted a couple of months ago. When I first planted them, I planted them in dirt that I had weeded, but many of the roots were still there. It had been over a month since I had worked with my little garden. Unfortunately, most of these little flowers never had a chance, because the weeds/bermuda grass came up and choked them out. Add to that - my inconsistent wedding. If they weren't choked out at the beginning, they were edged out by the weeds that were allowed to get out of control and literally take over the entire space that I'd hoped would turn into a nice patch of wildflowers. When I went to weed last night, maybe 10 or 12 little flowers/stalks were there, even though I planted probably more than 100 seeds. As I began to attack the weeds, I inadvertently pulled up some of the flowers because they were hidden and because I was not being gentle enough. Even as I became more gentle, I found out that weeds were actually what were holding the flowers up and keeping them going. That became the tough part. The ground was super dry, so even when I was as gentle as I could be, I would end up pulling out the flower along with the weed I was trying to get. Around that time, my friend recommended transplanting the flowers altogether to a section of the ground that was cleared. So that's what we did. Maybe these little cosmos, asters, and ? will make it now. Of course they're still in an area that has weeds, so it's going to take persistence and consistency on my part to keep the weeds from becoming their support system/eventually killing them. And I'll have to keep watering, but at the beginning not so much as to drown them out, because they're still fragile.
Some people might say that really there's nothing in my power that I can do that will ultimately make the flowers live or die. The flowers have free will and all that, and they chose those weeds, and all I could do was plant the seeds. I don't know that I have full power to make the flowers live and die and I don't know whether they chose the weeds or the weeds chose them, or both, or maybe they were just there from previous years. What I can see is that the weeds have the power to kill the flowers or at least fool the flower into thinking that it's standing on it's own and living a thriving, happy life when really it's just the bermuda grass that's holding it up. What I also know is that consistent and persistent love and gentleness go a long way with these little flowers that I love.