I recently caught up with some fellow Texans. Amy Crowell owns a small organic gardening and edible landscape design business in Austin. Edible Yards helps clients design and establish productive edible gardens and landscapes appropriate for the central Texas climate. Check it out at www.edibleyards.com and take a look at Amy’s blog at www.wildedibletexas.wordpress.com.


Amy is currently writing a book on the wild edible plants of Texas to be published by the University of Texas Press. She has more than 15 years of gardening experience, dating back to when she helped start the Dartmouth Organic Farm, now a permanent part of the outdoor programs office. 


She is married to Chris Sheffield and has a 4-year-old son named Joe Henry and a 2-year-old son named Garner. “We usually spend our free time hiking in the greenbelt, canoeing Lady Bird Lake, swimming at Barton Springs and tending our backyard vegetable garden,” she writes. “Oh, and we just built a treehouse for the kids a few weeks ago. Fun!”


Amy reports that Laura Sigman and her husband, Nick Levin ’99, visited a few months ago with their new baby Alex. Laura is currently finishing up her residency in pediatrics and Nick is a lawyer in Washington, D.C.


Amy also stays in touch with Amy (Thomas) Campion through e-mail and her website, www.therovinglocavore.com. That site promotes the importance of sustainability and eating healthy and locally grown food. 


Amy recently returned to Alabama from a year in Italy where her husband, Peter Campion ’98, completed a writing fellowship. While in Rome Amy volunteered for Bioversity International’s Diversity for Life campaign, which fosters education about agricultural biodiversity and the value of traditional foods in the face of an increasingly homogenous world diet that is low on nutrition. She also just finished a doctoral dissertation on four 18th-century and Romantic authors, the short title of which is “Scandalous Figures” and is teaching a team-taught interdisciplinary course called “Sustainability and our World” at Auburn University.


Patrick Hansen, another fellow Austinite, writes: “I’m still at Convio, which went public earlier this year. I’m writing on the way back from our fifth annual client summit in Baltimore, our biggest and most successful summit to date. Cynthia (’99) and I had a busy summer. We spent about nine weeks altogether in Wisconsin, where I telecommuted and she worked on writing her dissertation (when we weren’t swimming, cycling or fishing on Wood Lake in Grantsburg). My brother Derek (’01) came and stayed with us for about a week.


“We also took a long-awaited trip to Denmark and Sweden to visit family and friends. Cynthia presented a paper at the University in Lund at the end of our two weeks over there. Her talk was the catalyst for finally making the trip.”


Neneh Kowai-Bell says “hey” from Houston. After getting her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, she now teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, which is located on a nature preserve. She writes: “The campus looks like a wildlife preserve and at night families of deer come out to graze. Apparently we also have alligators, but I have made it a point not to look for them.” She counts Christine Kataoka and Omen Wild among her close friends, and in graduate school, her lab mates included Mark Seery ’98 and Christena Cleveland ’03.


Best wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy holiday season and a wonderful 2011!


—Jason Casell, 9209 Donner Lane, Austin, TX 78749; jcasell@aol.com