Oh, the thoughtlessness of people. They build themselves a pleasant house, construct a lovely garden, decorate it with a few scraps of interesting architecture and then they die. Or go bankrupt.

And the park is left lonely and unloved, decaying into wilderness.

Then a couple of centuries later along come Wim Meulenkamp and me, poking fun at the follies and rootling among the undergrowth with a deranged dog and one bored but patient wife (mine, not Wim’s).

Because what Wim and I see is the original dream. We don’t see the snotty, screaming kids, the pit bull terriers straining at their leashes; we don’t see the mud and the ice-cream wrappers, the hoodies, the discarded boxes of McDonald’s fries.

We seldom see — and shame on us — that behind the apparent desolation there is almost always a keen, enthusiastic and dedicated team who selflessly put themselves out to do all they can to rescue the past park. And they all suffer from the same malady: they have no money.

They need cash and they need physical help, but they cannot hope to approach the fortunes that were spent in the original creation of the parks and gardens, or recruit the armies of navvies who dug the lakes and built the bothies and grottoes.

Take Wanstead Park in east London. When Wanstead House was built by Colen Campbell for Sir Richard Child it cost something like £360,000. That’s about the same as you’d spend on a flat in Wanstead today. But £360,000 in 1714 equates to over half a billion pounds today. That’s quite a sum to envisage.

The back of Wanstead Grotto after recent extensive scrub clearance

The house was knocked down in 1824 because of the profligacy of the heiress’s husband, the repulsive reprobate William Pole-Tylney-Long-Wellesley. The great plantations were cut down by W.P.T.L.W for timber, but he couldn’t sell the lakes and so the park survives — just. It is quite possible to walk the park as we did, lost in the eighteenth century, with the dream aided by contemporary and current maps side by side on notice boards dotted here and there.

Readers of a certain age will remember Stephens’ Ink. Avenue House in Finchley, north London was bought from the fortunes made through the sale of the stuff, H. C. ‘Inky’ Stephens creating an agreeable, faintly French renaissance house set in a lovely arboretum, with Pulhamite water features, a romantic water tower and a bothy, one of the first concrete buildings to be constructed in England. When he died, Stephens left the house and grounds to the people of Finchley.

There are few similarities between Avenue House and Wanstead Park — one is an extremely large garden in an affluent northern suburb and the other is a rolling country estate surrounded by drab east London — but both contain follies, grottoes or garden buildings, which is what presses my buttons, and both are crying out for help.

If I were a rich man … but I’m not, so all I can do is publicise their plight. Alas, I’m also hopeless with a pair of secateurs. Both Avenue House and Wanstead Park have active conservation groups. They need support and help, both financial, intellectual and physical.

Until February 28^th Wanstead Park is consulting on a conservation statement. You can get involved and comment even if you have nothing to do with Wanstead. Visit http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/wansteadparkproject

There’s an exhibition at the Temple in Wanstead Park till the end of the month. Call 020 8532 5334 for more information. They’re preparing an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a sum believed to be in the region of £6 million. A drop in the ocean compared to the original cost.

Avenue House has no such leisurely process to comfort them. They need hard cash and they need it NOW. They are suffering — truly suffering — in this climate of cuts and cold charity. Bill Tyler of the Avenue House Estate Trust writes “For over six years the Trustees have run the Mansion and Grounds in East End Road without any subsidy or grant whatsoever from Barnet Council. We have sought Council help to see us through the lean January/ February/March period when company budgets run out and private functions are at their lowest. Unless we receive immediate substantial funds the estate will have to be handed back to the council early in March.  We have already been told the Mansion could then be boarded up and with minimal maintenance for the Grounds.”

Local councillors agree that the Avenue House grounds are one of Finchley’s finest assets. If you can help in any way, please contact them through the Avenue House website, http://www.avenuehouse.org.uk

Both are worthy of every piece of help we can give.

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