Gardening

         
Tips 

About Mrs. Hartley

Pages
Homepage
About Mrs. Hartley
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Special Articles
Ways Of Obtaining Plants
Fish Ponds
Gardening Quotes


 

Mrs Hartley reached the age of 95 last birthday and having retired some 20 odd years ago, she used to spend a little while knitting in the afternoons and evenings until recently when she had a severely debilitating stroke. All this knitting was put to good use with a constant supply of sweaters for the family and cuddly toys for the youngsters. For the last few years she also presented the local nursery/playgroup with a couple of boxes of cuddly toys every Christmas. She often made up her own patterns, or altered existing ones. It was from the creation of these patterns that her first book was put together entitled “Knitting Patterns For Beginners.”

Mrs Hartley also enjoyed a lifetime of gardening and she has written a semi-biographical book called "From Hardware shop to Garden Centre" detailing a large part of her life when she started and built up a successful garden centre. As you will see from the articles on this site she stayed a keen gardener until a few years ago. Mrs Hartley has written several articles for local news papers on gardening and she also wrote articles on gardening for the local blind newspaper as surprisingly she was registered partially sighted, which, made her books and her hobbies, all the more remarkable. Her refusal to give up her hobbies as her sight deteriorated is an inspiration to us all.

Unlike many people her age her hands remained as slim and as agile as they were when she was 20 years old. Mrs Hartley’s doctor put this manual dexterity down to her regular knitting and said that she would be unlikely to ever suffer from Arthritis in her hands. Neither did she suffer from arthritis in her legs even though she had one hip replacement over 20 years ago after a bad fall and a second about 8 years ago. She used to enjoy going out for little walks around garden centres, regardless of whether it was summer or mid-winter until a couple of years ago, but then she went into a nursing home after a stroke and sad to say she passed away 2 days after her 95th birthday.