FLOWER POWER

‘I grow every single thing from scratch’

Hanna Armitage, 37, lives in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, with husband Sam and daughters, Phoebe, six, and Martha, four. In 2018, she transformed an abandoned nursery into Winterbrook Garden Nurseries, a community hub.

THE IDEA

I was a secondary school art teacher and hated my job. While I loved its creative side, I didn’t love the box-ticking paperwork. When we moved back to my home area, I gave up teaching and we relied on my husband’s salary from the local agricultural college, while I dabbled in my artwork and textile designs, and raised the girls. But I was itching for more. Then, in 2018, a plant nursery my dad had rented out for over 30 years was abandoned by his tenant. Dad and I went to take a look and it was such a mess – with dying plants and a broken greenhouse, we were