Sometimes. at remote places in Scotland, sheep and cows graze on golf courses, not seldom trampling the tees and greens, wherever the maintainance staff hasn’t fenced them off. From that stems a family locution, where a frustrated player is quoted, sighing: “Them cows are pigs”.

I want to alter this to: “Them pigs are pigs.” I am talking about wild boar, living in suburbia. And increasingly in Berlin proper, too. Not a week goes by without a report of some damage, the roaming beasts have caused.

Maybe twice to three times a year, they also visit my garden. Digging around for I don’t know what, destroying my flowers. Last week, late in the evening, we heard a weird sound on the road, muffled clopping noises. When we went outside, the neighbours were already out on their balcony, telling us, it was a sounder of wild boar galloping down the road and dissappearing around our house to the lawn in the back. I went outside to my new garden patch on the side of the house, to protect my peas and potatoes. I could hear the snorting and smell the presence of the pigs, but they weren’t to be seen. After a while, I came back in – after all, I could not stand there all night. In the morning I saw the damage. They obviously had come back, but oddly weren’t interested in my vegetables. Instead, they investigated the front of my garden. Uprooting the first third of my flower patch, trampling much of the rest. Also breaking a branch off of my apple tree growing next to the climbing roses. Of course the one with fruit on it. As the little tree had only three branches to start with, it now looks very two-dimensional, with one branch sticking out on either side.

Yesterday, I had time to repair the damage. I was on the brink of getting a fence, too, following the sample of many neighbours, who got tired of having the pigs digging through their front gardens regularly. But decided against it once more. I think it is stupid, to fence off my tiny plot. We’ll see, how long I’ll keep on just replanting. Maybe, if they were after my vegetables, I’d go for a fence. But planting new and different flowers is fun, too. The pigs giving me a reason to look for different flowers to have. Yesterday, I went for larkspur, phlox, vervain and mealy blue sage to complement, whatever them pigs had left of my flower patch last week.