105-year-old Aucklander shares her secret to long life
Joan Brennan is 105 and credits her long life to home grown herbs – she discovered natural therapies in her 50s – and friendships.
Brennan celebrated her latest birthday on Saturday at a party with friends and family at Point Chevalier's Selwyn Village.
She said looking after her health had always been important to her.
She said she tried to stay away from taking conventional pills and tablets whenever possible.
Some of the plants she had grown included milk thistle and arum lily - which she put on septic sores.
Friendship had always been very important to her as well, she said.
Her son, Barry Brennan said he believed she had lived so long because she had good genes, developed excellent survival skills from living through the 1920's and 1930's and had lived healthy by eating wisely and exercising every day.
Brennan continued to volunteer every Tuesday at an opportunity shop.
Selwyn Village senior administrator Lisa Hulton said Brennan regularly caught three buses from the village to buy organic vegetables on Richmond Rd.
She's also the grand master of the 500 club at the village. Its members said she ran the weekly club, baked something different for it every week, did the dishes afterwards and still played a good game.
Brennan was born in England in 1912 and moved to Australia in 1922 with her mother and sister, after her father was killed in WWI. She moved to New Zealand and trained as a nurse before returning overseas to the Isle of Man.
Brennan met her husband Tom while in England and they relocated to New Zealand after getting married in 1935. For seven years they were lighthouse keepers on Portland Island in Hawkes Bay, looking for submarines and reporting on the weather.
"These were very happy times - we did a lot of fishing together," she said. The couple relocated to Auckland, first to St Mary's Bay and then to Campbells Bay.
In 1990 the Brennans shifted into Selwyn Village and Tom died in 1998.
Written by Mary Fitzgerald. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.