By Mary Cristy
 TOWN CRIER FILE PHOTO Craig Murray has been offering prize-winning produce from his garden in Los Altos Hills for the past 16 years. |
When Los Altos Hills counts the names of its significant citizen-contributors, organic horticulturalist Craig Murray’s will be among the first.
For the past 16 years the young bachelor has tended and extended his “field of dreams” to grow the finest and most nutritious produce available. Proof of his effectiveness is evident in the grateful consumers who make their way to his Dori Lane garden to discover their quest for produce wholly free of harmful pesticides has been rewarded.
Since the garden’s inception, Murray’s low-key approach has remained modest, even as he has garnered many blue ribbons and best of show awards (40 from one competition alone!).
By now many of his enthusiastic followers know from personal experience that his garden affords stress relief and sanctuary. A Stanford surgeon finds it “a slice of sanity” away from his hospital routine. Artists, photographers and savvy shoppers come to relax, to paint, to photograph and to seek inspirational subject matter.
Even European travelers, versed in Scotland’s legendary Findhorn Garden and French Impressionist Claude Monet’s breathtakingly beautiful lily pool at Giverny, pay homage to the man who chose horticulture as his life’s work because “it combines art and science.” His time at California’s Polytechnic University trained him to serve both.
Murray looks worldwide for new, exotic seeds and unfamiliar ingredients used by researchers to “feed the soil so it can feed the plants.” He also contributes his horticultural therapy to mental health clients at Miramonte’s Discovery Center.
His files reveal warm letters of thanks for his teaching, supervision and donations of plants to ensure a bountiful harvest. A rehabilitation specialist with whom he worked wrote of her deep appreciation and the pleasure and enlightenment he brought to her equally grateful charges, many of whom wrote their own letters.
Students from Foothill College and other educational venues learn from this expert how to cultivate greenhouse seedlings through the long winter until they are tall enough and hardy enough to transfer outdoors when the danger of frost is past.
Draeger’s in Los Altos invited Murray to share his original recipes at its cooking classes. As part of the classes, he provides his Dori Lane produce.
Murray has equipped his garden with canning facilities to take home-grown tomatoes from vines to jars to supply himself, friends and family through the winter, armed with his own free kitchen-tested recipes.
Chefs, sous chefs and nationally known culinary mavens beat a path to his door to compose and share their proudest and tastiest concoctions. Sunset magazine has featured and photographed him among the glorious blooms he creates for his personal annual flower show to lift the hearts of ill residents and passersby, who rarely fail to stop, inquire, buy and express delight at their discovery.
Along with the labor of love in his garden, Murray works diligently at his “bread & butter” construction and landscape design activities. Murray’s modesty and genuine reluctance to name-drop or seek personal glory remain refreshing.
Content and a little embarrassed by high praise, he prefers to let his products make their own statement in the hope they inspire each person to find a little weed patch or a barren field, turn it into a thing of beauty and present a gift to the environment.
