Barking up the right tree!

Released:

Local company Watertight and Birmingham Dogs Home joined forces with the Council’s Planting Our Future campaign this week to plant 372 trees.

They decided to work together to celebrate The Queen’s Green Canopy and support the Council’s plans to plant 250,000 trees in ten years.

The trees were provided by the Planting Our Future Team with sponsorship from Watertight and planted on land at Birmingham Dogs Home’s Solihull centre.

Cllr Ian Courts, Leader of Solihull Council, said: “Thanks to the support of companies and organisations like Watertight and Birmingham Dogs Home, our award-winning Planting Our Future team is on target to plant 250,000 trees in the borough in ten years. Planting trees on this scale helps us to meet our carbon net zero target and combat climate change - capturing carbon and helping to prevent flooding. It also provides new homes for wildlife.

“Birmingham Dogs Home has centres in Solihull and near Wolverhampton. It does some incredible work, looking after around 2,000 dogs a year until they can find them loving homes. Sadly, in the last couple of months they’ve received a record number of stray dogs from across the region so I’m really pleased that this partnership has been able to help them in such a practical way.”

Birmingham Dogs Home’s Head of Fundraising, Fi Harrison said: “This is a fantastic project for our charity.  We are lucky to have lots of open space for our dogs to exercise and these donated trees will create much needed shade in the summer and lots of interesting places to explore and sniff which is great enrichment for them.  The trees will also help to stop some of the flooding issues we have had, so our exercise field will be less boggy in the winter months and we will have fewer muddy paws to clean!  We are very grateful to everyone involved for their support which will benefit our four-legged residents for many years to come.”

David Christie, Project and Technical Manager for Watertight added: “Our company provides innovative flood resilience solutions and we understand the important role that trees play in preventing flooding. We are already committed to planting trees so supporting the Planting Our Future campaign made perfect sense. We planted 372 trees at Birmingham Dogs Home to celebrate the number of properties that we have helped with flood protection.”

To find out about Planting Our Future initiatives and how you can get involved, contact the Planting Our Future team at:  https://www.solihull.gov.uk/your-future-solihull/planting-our-future

To find out how you can donate to Birmingham Dogs Home or adopt a dog, visit https://birminghamdogshome.org.uk/