Drusillas Park near A27 issues appeal for garden offcuts

Drusillas near Alfriston has asked residents to “skip the tip” as they ready their gardens for summer and donate any unwanted clippings as tasty treats for its 800 animals instead.

Plant offcuts are a valuable food source for many of the animals at the zoo, including the sloths, lemurs, capybaras and many primates.

Gordon the sloth (Image: Drusillas)

The zoo has an onsite plantation of bamboo but many households have variations of bamboo it does not always have access to, such as phyllostachys nigra or black bamboo which keepers say is like “panda candy” to red panda pair Maja and Mulan. Creating a plant stockpile will also allow the zoo to regenerate its plantation over the summer ready for the winter months.

The animals particularly love hawthorn, ash, sycamore, willow and variations of bamboo including phyllostachys, phyllostachys nigra, and phyllostachys bissetii.

A lemur munching on some greens (Image: Drusillas)

Bamboo is a particular favourite of the zoo’s red panda pair, who can much their way through a whopping 4kg a day.

Head keeper Gemma Romanis said: “With the recent improvement in the weather, we know that many people will have started cutting back their greenery. We wanted to make the public aware that lots of our animal species enjoy eating lots of different plants and it forms a really important part of a healthy and varied diet for them.

“You’d be amazed at how much vegetation some of our animals eat – for example, our red pandas Maja and Mulan can get through a staggering 4kg of bamboo a day – that’s 40,000 leaves. Most people’s cuttings will likely end up on bonfires or at the tip, but donating them to the zoo instead means none of it goes to waste - one man’s trash is another’s treasure.

“We’re always looking for ways to make the zoo greener and work more sustainably. We have local businesses who kindly donate surplus vegetables to limit their wastage, we use natural materials for animal enrichment, we’ve switched our animal bedding to coir and zero per cent of our waste goes into landfill so we’d love to get our local community on board too and make sure these very usable plants aren’t just thrown away.”