It's an old suburb full of Victorian houses with large gardens, not yet as subdivided as those areas closer to the city.

Our house has an oak tree so big you can see from the top of Table Mountain.

It houses the usual suspects: pigeons, squirrels, and neighbourhood cats.

Occasionally it attracts the more exotic.

Once there was a guinea fowl, who roosted there, filling the evenings with its strange chirping calls.

Another time, an ill-tempered peacock make the tree his home for the night.

Kenilworth is pretty established, but I remember in Johannesburg, back in the 80s when we lived in the new suburb of Sunninghill.

A place where the wilderness was not quite bred out yet.

The lawns were still being coaxed out from the veld and paper thorns were a feature of any barefoot venture.

There were still anthills in the empty lots and snakes in the long grass.

My father told me when the house was being built, there were wild hares darting between the thorn trees.

As our neighbourhoods encroach upon previously uncultivated land, this infringement is met in turn with a counter (though unequal) trespass.

Sukoma Estate, a burgeoning suburb on the outskirts of Nairobi, has had a human casualty from the attack of a lion that led an otherwise discreet life in the neighbourhood.

I imagine an over-grown garden, hazel eyes through the rose-bushes, soft and silent paws.

These undomesticated interlopers of the night are everywhere.

I remember the chill the first time I saw coyotes.

Walking home in Vancouver, when a pack appeared, soundlessly scavenging around dustbins.

Just as quickly slinking back into dark flowerbeds.

They looked a bit like the foxes I saw once in London, who were playful as kittens haunting the small gardens.

My aunt who lives there hates them. They eat her bunnies.

Sometimes you will find the domestic rewilding. I saw this in Pare Buttes Chaumont.

There were pet parakeets, once again feral, flourishing in Paris, feasting off the chestnut trees.

Flocking on the branches of the city's parks.

Defying the winter grey and cold.

In Waterkloof, a lush suburb in Pretoria (all set about with purple Jacaranda trees), my friend's dog found a crocodile at the bottom of his parent's garden.

It had been washed there along a river from a faraway crocodile farm in a sudden violent storm.

The crocodile was still, watching the lights of the Jacaronda city. The powerful ancient beast bewildered, perhaps elated, at its change of scenery.

It had to go back to where it came from of course, but it felt like a betrayal somehow.

Just as we betrayed the bees.

I sometimes forget insects are animals too.

There was a hive of them living and working quietly at the bottom of the garden under a hedge overgrown with an Indian Trumpet vine.

Their hive was large - they must have been there for months. The gardener discovered them while pruning back the unruly growth.

A gentle beekeeper came to take them away. He gave us some of the honey.

It was dark gold in colour and tasted just the way Kenilworth smells at night.

That evening in the dark garden, I thought of the bees, of their cleverness, of how they were no match for us.