Passionate about wildlife, Donna volunteers for several organizations that protect native plants and animals. She also makes her own organic wine and mead: A skill she learned from a medieval reenactment group. When not birdwatching or heirloom gardening, she might be a Viking with a treasure necklace or an ancient shadow slipping through the dark woods. Is she even real?
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She wrote her first book, Waking Up (aka Baskets for Butterflies) while living in the Arizona desert.
“I struggled to grow vegetables in the hot dry soil.” Each day, she recorded her struggles in a garden diary. Before long, another story arose…scrawled along the paper margins of the log. Soon, a sleeping garden gnome awoke from beneath a ‘magical’ mesquite tree!
“Thank goodness, Gnome came to help me save arid-land adapted heirloom vegetables.”
After retirement with an Arizona non-profit, Donna became anxious to explore wildlife and gardening in another, very different, climate. She relocated to the deep woods and swamps of east Texas. On the day of the move, she carefully wrapped Gnome’s sculpture in newspaper and brought him along.
He now watches beside Donna’s raised garden bed. “We still talk, but he has different advice, now.”
In Donna’s upcoming book, Roadrunner Settlement, a group of Arizona residents goes back in time to the twelfth century near a Hohokam village to change history and prevent impending world-wide ecological collapse. Settlers must learn ways to live harmoniously with nature, resources, and each other. It’s mission is not to be dark and hopeless but, instead, light-hearted and funny. (COZY / HUMOROUS / YOUNG ADULT)
