A view of the front yard bed.
Beautiful Gardens Martha Bartels Kingston, ontario story and photos by shauna dobbie
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Martha Bartels.
40 • 2020
he just started out with a little strip of a garden in this house and the whole thing grew from there. Martha Bartels’ garden has been shaped over the years to become an award-winning showplace of colour and bloom for the neighbourhood. Her father helped her a lot in the early days. The family was from Holland—Martha was eight years old Issue 2
when they moved to Canada—and her father was a gardening devotee. Aside from loving flowers, she found it therapeutic. “I had problems in my marriage and when I separated, so I just would go out and start digging in the garden,” she says, adding that she finds it as therapeutic now as she did then. She spends four or five hours per localgardener.net
