Paul Donovan caring for Wanstead Park and the Flats

It occurred to me, when thinking back to my childhood in Wanstead Park and on the Flats in the 1960s and 70s, there always seemed to be much more grassland around.

Areas like around the big mound opposite Northumberland Avenue, the Shoulder of Mutton, and Heronry Lakes were almost like pampas plains.

Today, there are some big thickets of brambles, especially around the mound area.

Similarly, the terrain on the Flats has changed a lot.

The Epping Forest authorities spend a lot of time cutting back broom and brambles to maintain grasslands. 

The big changer was that back in the day, cows roamed freely across these areas, eating back the broom and brambles.

Cllr Paul Donovan gets nostalgic about the parks of his childhood (Image: Paul Donovan) Herds of 30 or 40-plus cows would wander around, eating back the vegetation. They also helped themselves to the prize plants in some front gardens, but that was unusual and a small price to pay for the ecological succession.

The cows brought a wonderful intervention that helped many other creatures in the ecological succession.

The recent reintroduction of a few longhorn cattle by the plain area in the park for a few months each year is having a similar small-scale effect. The longhorns are due back in September.

Nature is constantly changing. A wood is not a wood that will stay the same forever. The same applies to meadows and fields.

Every landscape is a dynamic thing, they are growing, living, breathing things.

If the cows are not around or alternative interventions made, the land would turn (or should that be return) to scrub and bramble. All will turn to forest.

It is important that, as humans, we act in partnership with nature and not act to dominate and destroy for the benefit of human beings.

Human beings are only one element of the natural world. We need to partner with the other aspects, not seek to dominate.

An absence of this partnership is evident in some of the mindless rhetoric we hear about how bats and newts must not be allowed to stop "development”.

Fortunately, we are seeing more of a partnership approach with initiatives like the rewilding movement. 

Locally, there are encouraging developments in the park and on the Flats, including the floating reed bed put in at the end of last year on the Heronry Lake, the skylark enclosure on the Flats and efforts to develop wildflower meadows.

These are all positive things that work in partnership with rather than against nature. This must be the way to work in the future - very much together forever.

• Paul Donovan is Labour councillor for Wanstead Village ward, Redbridge Council and a blogger (paulfdonovan.blogspot.com).