I have spent much of today weeding someone else’s borders. By weeding, I don’t mean spraying weedkiller around, or poking about optimistically with a hoe. I mean using a handfork, bent double in the borders, teasing out buttercups, docks, stray seedlings and wayward perennial offshoots, picking my way carefully between the plants I wanted to keep. My purpose was not to restore it to some prior ideal, but to choose how to let the planting develop. I left a good looking trio of self-seeded Aquilegias near the back of the border, but removed them from under the box balls at the front. I prised rogue geranium seedlings out of an otherwise clean sweep of Geranium ‘Rozanne’. The tiniest seedlings of cleavers, or goose grass were mercilessly removed, before they could get the better of the emerging Echinops.

Look, I’m not suggesting weeding is rocket science. But it was essential to do a good job today if that garden is to look as it is expected to in the coming months, and it seems that finding someone to do it well has proved hard. 


But, to judge from recent minor media eruptions, you would be forgiven for thinking I had wasted my valuable time on a menial task, easily done by any unskilled 15 year old capable of using a litter picker. Or perhaps you worry that I have submitted myself to the tyranny of the weed-obsessed, those whose garden visits are allegedly ruined by the sight of a saucy sprig of ground elder amongst the geraniums? 

I dont share these immoderate perspectives, but moderate opinions cut no mustard. So, I shall not be moderate. I shall assert as loudly as I can that weeding is a skilled and complex job, vital to the health and visual aesthetic of our nation’s gardens. So there…

You think that’s overstating it? How many garden designers walk away from a newly completed, pristine project with a heavy heart, knowing that the new owners expect low maintenance to mean absolutely no maintenance? How many garden owners hire a gardener, only to find that they know how to use a hedge trimmer, but don’t know a dandelion from a delphinium?

Somewhere, somehow weeding has become a dirty word. It has simply come to mean the removal of debris, like picking up litter or sweeping the floor. Perhaps it’s just the fact that it has to be done at ground level and the nation’s office-trained backs find that tortuous – or even demeaning. 

But as soon as you declare your patch of ground to be a garden, you declare intent. A garden is a creation – the result of every decision you make about what to leave, what to add, what to take away. It’s also the result of the decisions you don’t take of course, the things you mean to do, but never quite get round to. Weeding is the getting round to it, the doing, the making decisions and carrying them out in an ever-changing, interactive environment. (By the way, deciding not to remove a ‘weed’ counts as weeding, as long as you can be sure you really decided, rather than just couldn’t be bothered.) Weeding means getting involved with your garden, handling it, understanding it. 

Might it be even more than that? Weeding is chipping away the unwanted stone to reveal the sculpture which exists only in your mind’s eye. It’s the lifting of paint from a canvas. It’s the subtle changing of a chord in the composition of a song. 


Weeding is an act of respect for your garden, an act of love.

And when done with skill, knowledge and imagination, you might even say that weeding is art.


April 24, 2012  
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