The Creativity of Weeding

Photo by Kasturi Roy
on Unsplash

When I was studying to become a librarian, I had a part time job as a signwriter’s assistant. A big part of my job – actually, I would say it was one of the biggest parts of my job, was a task called “weeding”.

Weeding involved getting rid of any material that wasn’t part of the sign. I’d carefully strip away the excess vinyl that wasn’t part of the design, so that only the actual design and words were left. Everything else was extraneous. Unnecessary. In fact, if we didn’t get rid of the material we weeded, it would render the sign useless. You wouldn’t be able to see the design or properly read the words.

When I became a librarian, I soon learned that a task called “weeding” was a part of that job, too. Items that were too old, were in poor condition or hadn’t been used enough were earmarked for removal from the collection to free room for new items – or to create spaces for our patrons to use for various purposes (sometimes, in a library, empty space is more useful and more valued than books).

As a liaison librarian in a university, I was only tangentially involved in the weeding process. The resources team had a series of criteria for works that would turn up on the regular weeding spreadsheets. My role involved checking items that had been marked for weeding to see if they needed to be kept or replaced and occasionally scanning through the collection to find superseded editions that were too old to keep, even though they were too well used to turn up on the lists.

While weeding was less central to my role than it had been when I was a signwriter’s assistant, it was still central to the ecosystem of the library. As a team, weeding was a big part of what we did – and an important one. In order to keep the collection healthy, vibrant and relevant to our patrons, we had to have a “healthy” weeding programme.

As much as people freak out at the idea of a library getting rid of books, it’s the same principle as weeding in the signwriter’s workshop – or even weeding in a garden: you have to take out what shouldn’t be there so that it doesn’t detract from or obscure what should be there.

A good library isn’t full of books no one is using. There are some libraries that keep works for historical reasons, and we all work together to make sure we don’t throw out the last copy of something – but we don’t need to keep a book that no one wants to read. And we shouldn’t keep a book that no one wants to read, because a) it will make it harder to find a book you *do* want to read, and b) it means we won’t have space for the new books you might want to read.

But this post isn’t actually about weeding in libraries, it’s about weeding in general.

I briefly mentioned gardening a moment ago. Over the past few years I’ve been getting more interested in gardening, but I don’t come from a gardening background and (between work and family commitments) I keep stupid hours, so I don’t really have the time or know-how to get as into gardening as I want to. Most of the time I’m lucky if I can find the time to weed.

This has been a source of great frustration to me, because I’ve never really seen weeding as gardening. Weeding is a chore – a task. Gardening is a creative process. Weeding is taking plants away, while gardening is about adding plants and growing them… isn’t it?

A few weeks ago I looked at my overgrown and shaggy garden and realised that gardening is a lot like sculpture – the carving-figures-out-of-marble kind of sculpture. To butcher an old adage: you carve a sculpture of a lion by taking away all of the marble that isn’t a lion.

I suddenly realised that a large part of good gardening is weeding (and pruning – which is a kind of weeding, if you think about it). Yes, by all means gardening involves planting and designing, but to a large extent it involves carving away anything that isn’t the garden. Weeding isn’t just a chore that we do because we don’t like weeds. Weeding is something we do to make our gardens “intentional” spaces. We take out what isn’t part of the garden, so that the garden can be revealed.

Not too long ago I read a book written by a Zen garden designer. Now, when I say “not too long ago”, I mean “long enough ago that I’ve forgotten what that book was and who wrote it.” However, I do remember that it was written by someone who designed gardens for Zen Buddhist temples, and I remember that one of the pieces of advice that he gave was to go into the garden and think vary carefully about what needed to be removed. Do you need to sweep the paths? Do you need to prune this particular branch of that particular tree? Do you need to cut the grass over there?

There *is* a kind of creativity in weeding.

When you walk into a space and think of it as a sculpture, you ask yourself, “what needs to be removed so that what remains is improved?” This is absolutely a creative process, and one that can be done with only a few minutes to spare here and there.

It’s also a process that can be applied to so many aspects of our homes, workplaces, jobs and activities. In every domain of our lives, we could benefit from a bit of careful weeding. What is getting in the way of this space being better? Can you see the intentional design, or is too much of what is unintentional getting in the way? Can you strip away something extraneous and unnecessary to improve what remains?