Schrebergaerten or Kleingaerten, can be found in every German town with more than 5,000 inhabitants. They are, as the name Kleingaerten suggests, small gardens, or, to describe them in a better way, small pieces of ground you can rent if you live in a flat or in a house without a backyard. A collection of these gardens forms a colony, where people go at weekends, after work, or for the whole of the summer to indulge in the sheer endless pleasures of planting vegetables, mowing the lawn or cutting the hedge so that it stays under the prescribed limit of, say, 120 cm.

These gardens have a few major characteristics: the hedges and lawns are neatly trimmed; the walkways are clean and nicely raked, and there are little huts or sheds in the middle of most of the gardens.

Moreover, there are many festivities of all sorts taking place throughout the year among the Schrebergaerten's community of hobby-gardeners, all of which, including 'Children's Day', are used to get as drunk as possible, ehhhmmm, errrr, no, sorry, to improve the relationships within the community, of course.

Fortunately, most of the Schrebergaerten are open to the public, so you can see them for yourselves and have a good look. However, occasionally, the peace and quiet of the Schrebergaerten is destroyed, as many of the gardeners are notorious for their dislike of everything that has four legs, a tail and looks like a dog.