This year’s awardee of the Boothbay Region Garden Club Scholarship is Daniel Murray, a bio-engineering major at the University of Maine at Orono. The Garden Club created this scholarship in 2005 to benefit students pursuing educational interests in ecology, horticulture, marine biology, conservation, earth science or botany. Although the BRSAF has discretion in awarding the scholarship the favored criteria for making the award remain in the above scientific, especially in horticultural and in the earth and marine sciences areas.

The Garden Club’s scholarship is one of the activities of an organization founded in 1931 amidst the Great Depression when joblessness forced many Americans to peddle apples on the street and when many towns and cities distributed free seeds to encourage the unemployed to abandon their vigils at closed factory gates and start planting gardens to feed their families during the coming harsh winter. Thoughts of gardening were in the air in 1931 in Boothbay Harbor, New York City, and almost every other town and city large and small. And, surely planting flower gardens and adding a flowery brilliance to the harbor’s streets and by ways helped dispel the gloom of the early Great Depression. Indeed, the Garden Club’s flower beds and other plantings still bring cheerful color and beauty to the region’s commons and streetscapes.

Under the current presidency of Judy Burgess, and with officers Mimi O’Neill, Nan Jackson, Becky Singer and Sandra Abernathy, as during the 1930s, the 130-member club maintains gardens such as the Boothbay Memorial Park, hosts special events such as the Festival of Trees at Christmas, works with elementary school children and the Scouts, and, finally, via the Boothbay Region Student Aid Fund sponsors one of the BRSAF’s “Named Scholarship” of which Dan Murray is this year’s recipient.

Murray, we have learned, is eagerly pursing his freshman-year bio-engineering studies at UMO. Having taken Advanced Placement Biology classes at the Boothbay Region High School, Murray quickly discovered that he had fulfilled his bio-engineering requirement for his first semester, and thus could focus on the program’s intensive math requirements such as Calculus I. Bio-engineering, he learned, encompasses a wide area of specializations including prosthetics and pharmaceuticals. At this point he is unsure which direction in this broad field his demanding bio-engineering studies will take him.

However, for Murray, academia is not all work and no play. In the fall he joined the UMO “Outing Club” and engaged in hiking and canoeing trips. Since UMO’s large, verdant and beautiful campus has miles of cross-country ski trails, and with Sugarloaf just one hour away, Murray could be skiing as you read this article. In other words, Dan Murray is fully enjoying college despite the challenge of a difficult curriculum. We at the BRASAF wish Dan the best and are grateful for sponsors such as the Boothbay Region Garden Club for its support of this future, highly-educated bio-engineer.