December/January 2023

Garden & Gun

Soul of the South

Garden & Gun2 min read
Garden & Gun
David DiBenedetto Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Creative Director Marshall McKinney / Photography and Visuals Director Maggie Brett KennedyExecutive Editor Amanda Heckert / Deputy Editor David Mezz / Style Director Haskell HarrisArt Directo
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Calling All Booklovers
You never quite know what’s going to arrive in the mail at the G&G offices. Recently I received a stunning handmade wooden memorial for Pritchard, my late Boykin spaniel, from a reader in Madisonville, Louisiana, that truly stole my breath. There are
Garden & Gun1 min read
Making Memories in San Antonio
As I type this, I’m just back from the Garden & Gun Society’s annual gathering. This year, we headed to San Antonio, where a number of members joined some very special guests and contributors, including Latria Graham, Vivian Howard, Woody Platt, and
Garden & Gun2 min read
Contributors
With forty-two novels (and counting) to his credit, the eighty-five-year-old literary titan James Lee Burke has no plans to slow down. “I write every day and take no days off,” he says. “It’s the greatest life in the world.” One of his series follows
Garden & Gun3 min read
“I Always Have Garden & Gun Displayed Until The Next Issue Comes Out, But This Copy May Stay Awhile”
Your cover with the roseate spoonbills has taken my breath away (October/ November 2022). They are extraordinary creatures: their legs so beautifully poised for their landing; their elegant beaks; their exquisitely colored feathers against the sky. I
Garden & Gun1 min read
2022 Good Dog Photo Contest
Meet Margeaux, a terrier mix, and Chauncey, a Brussels griffon mix, the overall winners of our 2022 Good Dog Photo Contest. Their owner, Rita Badalamenti, snapped this photo on a morning walk in Fairhope, Alabama, capturing two-year-old Margeaux’s eb
Garden & Gun4 min read
King Of The Hill
Josh Lucas describes his career as a tide—fitting, given the fifty-one-year-old spent his childhood on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, just outside Charleston. At age nine, he got bitten by the acting bug there, after hiding in the dunes to watch
Garden & Gun3 min read
Stitching the Unexpected
Coulter Fussell never knows what she will find donated on the doorstep of her studio in Water Valley, Mississippi. A dowager’s mink, a cheating husband’s neckties, a rotting piece of Astroturf—anything could be in those Hefty bags. “Once I got a beav
Garden & Gun5 min read
Mississippi Calling
There’s a lot to catch your eye with a duck call hand turned by the custom call maker Josh Raggio. The Mississippi artisan crafts calls from gorgeous horse chestnut burl, cocobolo, African blackwood, and other grade A woods from around the world. He
Garden & Gun3 min read
Landmark Encounter
Erected on a series of pillars, much of the highly anticipated International African American Museum (IAAM), which will open in late January in Charleston, South Carolina, does not touch the earth. That was a deliberate choice, says the museum’s pres
Garden & Gun3 min read
Hunting Lessons
After a life spent watching my neighborhood birds,” writes the Elgin, Texas, artist and devoted birder Margie Crisp, “wandering through sometimes remote habitats seeking out beautiful, unique, or simply new birds; after joining and supporting local a
Garden & Gun1 min read
Sage For The Ages
Although the living legend Wendell Berry guards his privacy, writing from his farm in Henry County, Kentucky, he has long revealed pieces of himself through his ruminations on the rural life, particularly in his Port William stories. Set in a fiction
Garden & Gun3 min read
Taking Flight
Rayland Baxter doesn’t mind being alone. While recording his new album, If I Were a Butterfly, he spent almost a year mostly by himself at Thunder Sound, a Kentucky rubber band factory turned recording studio, interrupted occasionally by the appearan
Garden & Gun1 min readMusic
Sister Power
Don’t let the delicate blues groove of the opener “Deep Stays Down” fool you. Two minutes into Larkin Poe’s Blood Harmony, the thundering guitars kick in, setting the tone for the thickest, heaviest effort to date from Georgia-born sisters Megan and
Garden & Gun3 min read
Dog Forsaken
Have a burning question? Email editorial@gardenandgun.com Does God have an existential justification for dogs that don’t hunt, or work sheep, cattle, or farms? We think not. That darn distribution list for God’s memo on the plans for the canine speci
Garden & Gun3 min readRegional & Ethnic
Saucy Squash
Joey Ward comes from a generation of well-trained young Atlanta chefs who a decade ago pushed the city into a new and more adventurous chapter. No place embodied that era more than Kevin Gillespie’s brash, delicious Gunshow, where Ward spent six year
Garden & Gun3 min read
Louisville Legend
It was like a fistfight to sell the stuff years ago,” says Joe Magliocco, the presidentof Michter’s Distillery in Louisville. He is talking about the early aughts, when rye was still considered a fusty, outmoded whiskey that interested few. On sales
Garden & Gun5 min readRegional & Ethnic
Turning the Tables
Portland, Tennessee, was a town so small that the arrival of Mamma’s grandchildren—my mother and her four siblings among them—got announced in the local paper. They came during summers and holidays, filling the large white clapboard house. I imagine
Garden & Gun2 min readRegional & Ethnic
Sweet on Grapefruit
A few years ago, chef Aaron Bludorn, a veteran of New York City’s renowned Café Boulud, moved to his wife’s home state of Texas—and he brought his love of all things bitter with him. “It’s one of my favorite flavors,” says the executive chef and owne
Garden & Gun4 min readRegional & Ethnic
Poole’s Party
A deep white bowl, mounded with elbow noodles wrapped in a blanket of Jarlsberg, Grana Padano, and sharp white cheddar, graces every third table. The blackboard menu on the wall above red vinyl booths lists macaroni au gratin as a side dish. That’s u
Garden & Gun4 min read
The Nice List
The Virginia jewelry designer Elizabeth Locke’s new collection of bangles includes the delicate diamond and gold stunner at top and, below it, two rainbow-hued venetian glass designs that look equal parts Etruscan and 2023 ($7,300– $14,550; elizabeth
Garden & Gun5 min read
Dog Years
My daddy was a serious dogman. When he got out of the army after the First World War, he bought some surplus German shepherds, trained them to obey commands in English, and resold them. Business was good into the 1920s, when the enormous fame of one
Garden & Gun5 min read
That Spirit of Christmas
My cell phone begins to buzz, the name “Mom” flashing across the screen. We start the conversation the way we always do when I’m on the road for work: She asks me about the nearest town, and I try to catch its name as I whiz by the highway sign on my
Garden & Gun5 min read
The Gift of Ambivalence
When a marriage produces children, divorce delivers an ongoing series of scenarios we don’t talk about out in the open. Free holidays for one, those spent without your children—not because you choose their absence for Thanksgiving, July Fourth, or Go
Garden & Gun7 min read
Holiday Party
Rebecca Gardner says she still believes in Santa Claus because he came to her mother’s Christmas parties in Corpus Christi, Texas, for decades. Turns out the guy with the real white beard was a man her mother had found slumped outside a local liquor
Garden & Gun10 min read
Hope On The Wing
The bald eagle was stuck, that much everyone on the ground understood. Somehow the bird had caught its head in the cold black metal fence surrounding a Department of Homeland Security facility. Frantic, the eagle flapped its wings, brown and white pl
Garden & Gun24 min read
Made In The South Awards
PLUS: OUR FIRST-EVER SUSTAINABILITY WINNER AN ENVY-INDUCING STATEMENT PIECE PUTS A CONTEMPORARY SPIN ON THE CLASSIC CURIO CABINET By Caroline Sanders Clements Behind the luminous bronze screen and the handsome dark walnut casing of Elijah Leed’s Wa
Garden & Gun12 min readDiet & Nutrition
Pass the Duck
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Chef John Fearrington runs the kitchens at some of the finest sporting lodges in America, and he blew it the first time he cooked wild duck. “I treated it like the farm-raised duck I had been used to cooking in restauran
Garden & Gun7 min read
Almost Heaven, West Virginia
On a snowy day in 1980, Chip Chase literally skied his way into a new life. He and a friend, Winslow Ayer, at the time two back-to-the-lander free spirits in their late twenties, were on a backcountry ski trip in the Allegheny Mountains of Tucker Cou
Garden & Gun6 min read
A Chapel of One’s Own
Even at eighty-five, I have never acquired much wisdom, other than perhaps the value of reticence and avoidance of judging others, lest I invite condemnation of myself. That said, I did learn a lesson many years ago about the earth and humankind’s du
Garden & Gun13 min read
The Southern Agenda
Many of us who have tried constructing a gingerbread house have imagined a candy manor and ended up with more of a sugar shack, gloopy icing seeping out of cockeyed cookie walls. But competitors at the Omni Grove Park Inn’s Thirtieth Annual National
Garden & Gun3 min read
Presents of Mind
From left: Forget-me-not necklace by Julie Cohn Design ($595); hydrangea blossom earrings by Julie Cohn Design($395); St. Louis sunglasses in petal by Krewe ($325); roll-top backpack by Iron Rivet ($650); pink pelican scarf by Carson & Co. ($332). Fr
Garden & Gun3 min read
A Matter of Inches
The eminent freestyle rapper-dancer Megan Thee Stallion and I are different in many ways. She is from Texas, I am from Georgia. Her middle name is Thee, whereas my middle initial is A. (For Alton.) She has a song out called “Sweetest Pie,” which incl

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