Rooted in Community: The Murdoch Friendship Garden
By: Kate O’Neill
For generations, communities cared for one another by sharing food. Extra produce from a garden, eggs from a backyard flock, a loaf of bread, or a meal at the table helped neighbors through hard times and strengthened the relationships built on mutual care and belonging.
Today, those traditions are being reimagined in Flagstaff’s historic Southside neighborhood through a shared landscape where food is grown, harvested, and passed along. Located beside the Flagstaff Community Fridge at the Murdoch Community Center, The Murdoch Friendship Garden invites community members to harvest what is ready, learn about high-elevation kitchen gardening, and experience food growing in the heart of the city. The ADA-accessible garden will be featured in the 2026 Coconino Master Gardener Association’s Garden tour on August 8.
The garden is supported by the Southside Community Association (SCA) at the historic Murdoch Community Center, a place with deep roots in Flagstaff’s history. The center sits on the site of the former Dunbar School, which served Flagstaff’s Black students during segregation. The surrounding neighborhood developed around the nearby sawmills, where African American workers recruited from the South became an important part of the city’s lumber, railroad, and service industries.
In 2024, the City of Flagstaff installed the new Cleo Murdoch Park to commemorate the school’s long-standing principal and provide an outdoor space for recreation and events. Around this time, Well Deserved partnered with SCA to install the first ever Flagstaff Community Fridge. This outdoor commercial-grade fridge and pantry provide a simple "take what you need, leave what you can" way for neighbors, farmers, restaurants, and local businesses to share fresh and shelf-stable food for anyone to access at any time.
As this outdoor space continued to evolve, expanding the garden became a natural next step. The original small raised bed, largely devoted to collard greens, reflected the garden’s early role as a place for growing culturally meaningful food and sharing harvests with the community. In the winter of 2025, the bed was expanded into a 1,400-square-foot community garden, transforming an underused space between the parking lot, Cleo Murdoch Park, and the building into a productive and welcoming landscape.
In its second growing season, the Murdoch Friendship Garden is managed by a small handful of volunteers, with support from a growing network of community partners. Its proximity to Northern Arizona University has created valuable partnerships with student service groups, whose support has been essential for garden installation, cleanup, and planting days.
The garden serves as both a neighborhood resource and a living demonstration of what is possible to grow in Flagstaff. Visitors to the garden will see how thoughtful design, experimentation, and local knowledge help maximize food production in a small urban space. Waist-height raised beds, widely spaced atop crushed granite, provide comfortable and accessible gardening. A keyhole garden with a built-in compost basket demonstrates how small spaces can efficiently grow food while recycling nutrients and conserving resources.
The garden’s plantings are intentionally selected to balance productivity, practicality, and place. Visitors will find scarlet runner beans climbing an archway, vigorous cherry tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers filling in-ground rows, and cut-and come-again greens that demonstrate how to grow more food in a small space. Heritage crops such as collard greens, southern and Asian greens, and Hopi red dye amaranth showcase the abundance possible when traditional knowledge and high-elevation gardening practices come together. Flowers and native plants—including marigolds, calendula, milkweed, and blanket flower—show how gardens can support both food production and biodiversity.
Perhaps one of the garden’s greatest strengths is simply that it is visible. Located in the heart of the Southside neighborhood, it brings the process of growing food into everyday community life. Thousands of people pass through this shared space each year, whether walking through the neighborhood, visiting the Flagstaff Community Fridge, spending time in the new Cleo Murdoch Park, or attending meetings and celebrations at the center.
Together, the garden and fridge create a shared landscape where both food production and food sharing are visible, inviting people to participate in a culture of mutual care.
Volunteers can contribute and learn from experienced gardeners during Thursday evening workdays from 4:30-6:00 pm throughout the growing season. Visit the Murdoch Community Center’s Facebook page for information on volunteer opportunities and other events.
The Murdoch Community Garden is one of the gardens featured in the Coconino Master Gardener Association Garden Tour on Saturday, August 8th from 10am-4pm. Buy tickets online at CMGA2026.eventbrite.com until 9 am August 8 or in-person August 8 at Warner’s Nursery from 9am-12pm.
Kate O’Neill serves as the Secretary of the Board of Directors for the Southside Community Association, supporting the organization’s mission through her work coordinating garden operations and volunteer engagement. She is a longtime food systems strategist who believes in the power of connecting people to their food, the places where it is grown, and the farmers and growers whose work nourishes our communities. Gardening Etcetera is shared with the community by certified Master Gardeners of the University of Arizona's Coconino County Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program. Have a gardening question? Visit our Online Plant Help Desk at https://extension.arizona.edu/programs/coconino-county-master-gardener.
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