Don Murphy stepped back from one of the raised garden beds he was preparing, removed his gloves, then leaned onto the eight-foot-tall fence built intentionally to keep deer and groundhogs away. It was his first formal attempt at creating a permanent backyard garden—an elusive endeavor thanks to a lifetime of nomadic resettling across the country.
“I felt like a Bonsai tree, trimmed and tortured into a shallow pot by having to move every few years,” he reflected.
The starting effort was exciting, adventuresome and overdue.
During the pause, he breathed in the crisp Allegheny regional air and a subtle sensation awakened childhood memory. His thoughts reeled him back to rare, but treasured annual visits to his grandmother’s middle Tennessee backyard garden that resulted in a kitchen table blanketed with endless and marvelous jars of fruits and containers of freshly grown vegetables—seemingly every kind imaginable.
It was there, in the confines of a small plot of land in the town of Paris, Tennessee—home of the world’s largest fish fry festival—that the intangible mystery and magic of gardening first unconsciously ensnared Murphy’s spirit like an infectious kudzu vine.
Although dormant, Murphy’s interest and desire over the decades to explore gardening could not be entirely severed. It was just waiting for its time to surface, a proper space for blooming.
A seasoned gardener will tell you that with each plant life, if you could look close enough and examine its logbook, there’s a unique plot—a conflict, a climax and a resolution—to be unearthed that is not unlike our own lives.
Neighborly Reminders
Murphy, a Southaven, Mississippi, resident since 2020, was recently honored by being named the 2025 Newbie of the Year Award for DeSoto County Master Gardeners. Its selection is based on the intern, or new participant, who puts in the most volunteer service hours through the program over 12 months, and the honor is coordinated through Mississippi State University’s local agriculture office.
His passion for forging a personal greenthumb path—and the learning curve that comes necessarily with agronomy—actively began in Pennsylvania, his prior residence before moving to Mississippi. The first plots took shape in 1996 when Murphy, then retired recently from the Army, and his wife Kathleen moved finally into a permanent home outside of Pittsburgh.
Murphy became inspired and determined after seeing a friendly neighbor care for an impressive, cultivated variety of shrubs to tap into his own latent enthusiasm and create a homespun horticulture in their large, sloping backyard.
His neighbor’s array of shrubs reminded Murphy of his dad’s Biloxi, Mississippi, residence, where his father relished the joy of growing hibiscus, sago palms, crepe myrtles, among other bushes, he explained.
“Dad shared my grandmother’s love for growing things, and when he left the Air Force and bought a house, he planted wisteria and vined it along the front and side of our open driveway until it became a wall of leaves and flowers, which provided shade and privacy,” Murphy told the Mississippi Free Press.
Just like his grandmother Chloe, his dad would often spend entire days outside working in the yard, so much so that he often lost track of time, and his wife would have to call him in for dinner or else he would dig and prune right past a prepared meal.
Similarly, “I’ve learned that I, too, enjoy spending large parts of my day outside,” Murphy said. “It’s good health to be outside, relaxing and therapeutic.”
After getting their hands dirty digging in the soil to grow and prune shrubs, the Murphys eventually turned their attention to planting fruits and vegetables. And once again, a new acquaintance with a striking garden became the catalyst for their expansion.
This time it was a World War II veteran of the Italian Army, Tony Decelois, a fellow parishioner in the couple’s church. “His backyard was like a dream garden,” Murphy recalled.
Lessons Learned
Motivated, Murphy replicated the man’s backyard design, planting cherry and large crabapple trees—eventually producing wonderful fruit pies—and later copious tomatoes and zucchini and particular heirloom beans originating in Italy the same neighbor gifted to the couple.
“The seeds grew big purple peas. We grew them high on a trellis,” Murphy remembered. “They were as beautiful as they were tasty.”
Closer to the house, he built a series of raised beds so that his wife could explore growing different vegetables like eggplants.
Kathleen’s inspiration to grow fruits comes from her own vivid memories of gardening when she was young, and they differ from her husband’s as much as a subway differs from a horse ranch. At around age 5, she collected and planted seeds, she recalled, and then marveled watching a watermelon grow in a narrow space at her family’s New York apartment complex.
“It was the most exciting thing, and that is where I got my first joy in gardening,” she said.
Every year, the Murphys added more raised planters and took note of what growing tactics worked and which ones failed. Lessons learned included topping squash and tomato plants with protective soil to prevent leaf mold as well as determining precisely when and how many seeds or roots to plant, how much irrigation and nutrients to apply and, notably, the revelation that finches carry with them seeds for invasive thorny thistle weeds.
“One key lesson which helped me to be less frantic in the garden was (realizing) that doing the same thing year after year doesn’t produce the same results,” Don said. “Each year has unique challenges.”
Home-Grown Inspiration
The couple’s joy to discover gardening’s complex intricacies deepened when they moved to Southaven, in part to live nearer to Don’s father, who had retired from a career service in the Air Force and resided in Ocean Springs.
One of the first garden-related actions the Murphys made after moving to the Mid-South, just as they did in Pennsylvania, was to find local inspiration. Thus, they visited Memphis Botanic Gardens before seeking out the local master gardening group, through the Mississippi State University Ag Extension Office in Nesbit.
While the Pittsburgh gardening circles gravitated toward small group classes held in city parks, which had demonstration gardens arranged on the grounds, the parallel interest group in DeSoto differs in that it’s more engaging, interpersonal and interactive, Murphy observed. The dynamic is signified by monthly meetings.
Master Gardeners who are involved in DeSoto, Murphy said, ”come from all walks of life: from those who know little about gardening, to some who run nurseries, to farmers, to some who grew up on a farm.”
So, too, does DeSoto offer an online learning portal, a helpful feature to get started, Murphy said. DeSoto’s group, he critiqued, “is very concentrated on the goal of fostering public gardening education, including a chain of command focused on children.”
The Mississippi State University Extension office leads the Master Gardener program across the state, coordinating a dual horticulture training and volunteer program. There are presently about 50 active certified master gardeners in DeSoto County, and they regularly hold presentations at area libraries and lead programs that teach students the science of growing food plants. 4H Clubs and home-schooled clusters of pupils also attend such programs.
MSU Extension Agent Matthew Thornton said the DeSoto office has a “focus on outreach and education for the community, and we do so with research-backed information. The DeSoto County Master Gardeners are a huge part of that locally.“
To become a certified master gardener through the MSU ag program, one must take a number of introductory educational classes and also volunteer a minimum of 40 hours over a year in gardening outreach. That is where Don Murphy spent a lot of hours last year, if not hundreds.
He helped introduce the fundamentals of growing plants to children at the DeSoto County Agri-Education Center, at Hernando Middle School and at Sacred Heart School. He also followed up on a comment that fellow member Jill Distefano mentioned during a monthly meeting about a need for a seed library.
“When someone commented that there’s a seed library offered at a Memphis library but (that) we don’t even have one in DeSoto, I said that it would be a dream of mine to start one,” Distefano told the Mississippi Free Press.
“Well, Don is what I would call a real doer,” she said, “and seems to never slow down. He’s usually in the back of the room with a spreadsheet, and he picked up the idea and essentially made my dream become a reality.”
An Idea Blossoms
In a short time, with collaboration from the First Regional Library system, two DeSoto branches—the first in Southaven and the other in Hernando—made seed libraries available where any patron can sign out selected, preferred seed packets for vegetables, herbs and flowers, with the understanding that the taker is able, hopefully, to return seeds in the future from fruits produced by the same seeds. Organizers hope the program ultimately becomes self-sustainable.
Distefano shared plans for a third seed library to open inside the Olive Branch library location in the near future. “The response from the public has been great, and this has happened in the off-season for gardening,” she said.
M.R. Davis Public Library Head Librarian Yalanda Priddy said it was practically an immediate “yes” to Murphy’s request when he approached her about the branch providing a designated area to set up a seed library.
“He presented the idea ready with all the plans. He’d researched the idea and had visited the Senatobia library—also a part of the First Regional system in another county—which had one already,” Priddy told the Mississippi Free Press.
Patrons immediately responded favorably to the tables of seeds arranged near the building’s entrance, Priddy said. “People have been signing seed packets out; the community has been engaged with it.”
For a library to offer a seed library only makes sense, she and Murphy echoed, because both separately offer valuable information packed inside them ready to produce growth of one kind or another.
Reconnection
Just as a neighbor’s manicured backyard stimulated nostalgia for his grandmother’s garden, the concept of starting a seed library evoked Murphy’s memories of his neighbor’s heirloom beans. “The idea was a trigger,” he said.
As he better researched heirloom seeds, Murphy began to appreciate their value beyond beauty and flavors. He noted that for centuries, what once was traditional in the Western world to share heirloom seeds from one generation to another, began to fade starting in the 1950s when large farming operations jumpstarted mass ag production across the U.S.
Methodology and machinery’s capability to maximize yields and feed more of the population quickly diminished interest in fostering a variety of unique seeds: Instead, seeds became more homogenous by default, Murphy explained.
Planting seeds is a deeper level of gardening because it better promotes self-sufficiency, Murphy added. “A packet of seeds will cost $2.50 at the store and can produce a whole lot of food for a lot of people,” he said.
The Murphys, together, underscore that it remains the underpinnings of gardening that have kept them hooked into the enterprise, keeping the soil rich and the spades nearby.
“The continuation of learning something new about gardening and the constant experimenting—that’s what it’s about,” Don said.
‘A Clean Slate’
In the wintry off-season, both said, is when the couple take a break, but then become re-energized with the possibilities of new variety of plants, including herbs to test-grow when cold temperatures break as they just did in North Mississippi. The Murphys partly do so by flipping pages in gardening books and magazines to find new possibilities.
“It creates a time where we start again with a clean, new slate,” he said.
On a recent February afternoon, the couple were busy preparing groundwork in their backyard just as the cold temperatures tantalizingly warmed in North Mississippi. Don had planted white clover in the grass and stacked a wood pile, both measures to attract bee pollinators. A big container filled with compost was on hand.
Right on cue, Kathleen mentioned plans to plant kale, which grew with great success in Pennsylvania, as well as bok choy, Russian lettuce and other plants she may or have not previously planted, or at least not yet in Mississippi soil. Don mentioned anticipation of growing peas, green beans and okra this season in addition to another harvest of cucumbers and tomatoes, guided within tall metal spirals.
The couple’s emphasis to diversify follows what wisdom Don said he’s gleaned from gardening’s trials and errors: “The most stable plot of land still needs its soil reinvigorated with newfound attention.”
Learn more about MSU Ag Extension’s Master Gardener programs and upcoming gardening events like the Mississippi Master Gardener 2026 Conference held from April 27 through April 29.