Garden Hopping!

What is ‘Garden Hopping’?

This is a definition from the Urban Dictionary:

1. Garden hopping

Usually a nocturnal pursuit, garden hopping is where a small group start in one garden and try to get across as many adjacent gardens as possible via any means available.

Me and my mates went garden hopping last night from my garden, we managed to go through 12 gardens, much further than we did last time.

This is a quote from  ‘Garden Hopping: Memoir of an Adoption’ by Jonathan Rendall:

Garden hopping was when you leapt through a line of people's gardens in the dead of night. Only a few boys did it. The air rushed through you. You were like a phantom. You could have been anyone.

And this is video from YouTube, with a demonstration:

Why am I telling you all this? Well it is because we have been ‘Hopped'. There has, apparently, been a spate of Garden hopping in Truro.

On Saturday morning I got up to find destruction in our garden (a bit of an exaggeration), some panels from the top of our garden fence had been broken and were lying in the garden in bits:

My prized Sambucus Nigra was almost destroyed:

I've done some repairs on it since, and wait to see if will recover.

If the 'Hopper' had done his homework he would have discovered that the wooden fence had been in place for many years and was full of rot.

I do hope the perpetrator did not break his leg (well, not in too many places).

He wasn't  much like a phantom more like a fairy elephant, a neighbour saw him moving away at about 4.00am, but couldn't tell whether he was limping or not.