Nashville Showstopper

There’s a linen-bound journal on a table in the sunroom overlooking the gardens at Nashville’s historic Craighead House, where the owner Steve Sirls, a landscape designer by trade, keeps sporadic but detailed accounts of the gardens’ goings-on. Everything from favorite plants to parties gets recorded for posterity. One of the earliest entries recalls the “garden-warming” soiree friends threw Sirls and his husband, Allen De-Cuyper, on a fall evening just