What is the symbolism behind the prison, cemetery, ugly weeds and the wild rose bush in the first chapter in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne?

The narrator says, in
Chapter I, that

The founders of a new colony, whatever
Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized
it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a
cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

In
other words, where human beings are concerned, they can be counted on to do only two things:
commit crimes (for which they'd need to go to jail) and die (when they'd need to go to the
cemetery). It's a pretty bleak view of humanity, but the prison and the cemetery seem to
symbolize this idea.

As for the rose bush, it grows near the door to the jail
and is

covered, in this month of June, with its delicate
gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he
went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep
heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This
description seems to pit nature...