Dudley Zoo’s red pandas are looking forward to an endless supply of bamboo, thanks to the generosity of a Shropshire family.

Holly Osborn discovered half an acre of the plant in her Shifnal garden  and her step-sons suggested donating it to feed the pandas at Dudley Zoological Gardens.

DZG’s red pandas Yang and Yasmin are now munching their way through the first wave of bamboo, and hope to enjoy many harvests to come.

Holly, her husband Richard Nicholls and step-sons Leigh, Ryan and Matt moved to their home, Shifnal Manor, last year and discovered the crop growing in the four-acre garden this spring.

She said: “It was a bit of a surprise and we didn’t know what to do with it until Leigh made the point that pandas eat bamboo, so we decided to offer it to Dudley Zoo.

“There is so much of it and it grows like wildfire, so we hope it can keep being harvested for the zoo’s pandas for years to come.”

“Our home was originally part of a moated deer park on Lord Stafford’s estate and we believe the bamboo was planted in the 1970s,” she added.

DZG Deputy Curator Richard Brown said: “Bamboo is a large and vital part of the pandas’ natural diet, they simply love it.

“This donation is extremely useful because  bamboo grown on site has become sparse since the red pandas arrived a few years ago, so this will help our own crops to recover and replenish and we’d like to say a massive thank you to Holly and her family for thinking of us.”

Holly and her step-sons will be visiting DZG later this spring to help feed some of their home-grown bamboo to red pandas, Yasmin and Yang.