Roberta P. “Sue” Bloodgood, whose vast inventory of hostas, daylilies and ornamental grasses made her Cockeysville nursery the destination for area gardeners, died of cancer May 28 at her Happy Hollow Road home. She was 81.
“We first met her 30 years ago,” said Stiles T. Colwill, who owns an interior decorating firm. “We drove to Happy Hollow for the first time and here was this woman walking an IV drip on wheels because she had Lyme disease and then jumped in with it all into a golf cart,” Mr.
Colwill said, with a laugh. “I thought, what otherworldly experience have we located? When they made Sue Bloodgood, they broke the mold.” Colin Kness was not only a longtime friend and neighbor, but also a customer.
“She lived the perfect ’60s lifestyle. She had no cellphone, iPad, computer or internet. She’d sit at the table with only a calculator,” Mr.
Kness said. “I’m in IT, and she always called me the ‘Cloud Guy.’” Roberta Page Bloodgood, daughter of Joseph Holt Bloodgood, a chemist, and Isabel Bloodgood, a Lord Baltimore Hotel administrative assistant, was born in Baltimore and spent her early years on Berkshire Road in Arcadia, near Herring Run Park.
When she was 16, she and her family moved to Happy Hollow Road in Cockeysville. Her paternal grandfather was Dr. Joseph Colt Bloodgood, an internationally known surgeon who was also head of the Johns Hopkins laboratory of surgical pathology and chief surgeon at what is now Ascension Saint Agnes Hosp.
