June/July 2023

Garden & Gun

Soul of the South

Garden & Gun4 min read
Contributors
PHOTOGRAPHER David McClister has built a career photographing the who’s who of the music industry, including Dolly Parton, Mavis Staples, Willie Nelson, and Taylor Swift. “I think I’m drawn to this subject because of my love of music and my utter lac
Garden & Gun3 min read
Bushwhacking for Brookies
Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @davedibenedetto To my mind, there’s not a more beautiful native fish, or one that lives in more beautiful surroundings, than the brook trout (a.k.a. speck) of the Appalachian Mountains. And while I’ve been fortunat
Garden & Gun5 min read
Letters
I am a mailman, and when I was delivering issues of Garden & Gun to people’s houses, I was very happy to see Jason Isbell on the cover (April/May 2023). I just watched his new documentary and have never seen a documentary that was so real. He puts it
Garden & Gun2 min readLeadership
Garden & Gun
David DiBenedettoSenior Vice President & Editor in Chief Creative Director Marshall McKinney / Photography and Visuals Director Maggie Brett Kennedy Executive Editor Amanda Heckert / Deputy Editor David Mezz Art Director Julia Knetzer / Photo Editor
Garden & Gun1 min read
What’s Online
GARDENANDGUN.COM Twice each month, G&G contributing editor T. Edward Nickens shares his insights on Southern sporting pursuits in his digital column, The Wild South. Nickens has spent decades in the field, and whether it’s a dispatch from the turkey
Garden & Gun4 min read
Head Of The Class
Deborah Roberts knows firsthand that teachers canbe beacons of light. The Emmy-winning ABC News correspondent grew up the seventh of nine children at the beginning of school integration in Perry, Georgia. In the sixth grade, she met her favorite Engl
Garden & Gun4 min read
Rising Son
On a sultry November day in the Dominican Republic in 2019, Tommy Prine was backstage at All the Best Fest, a five-day music gathering curated by his father, the legendary country-folk singer John Prine, with help from his mother, Fiona Whelan-Prine.
Garden & Gun4 min read
Silver Rush
On July 1, 2020, North Carolina guide Seth Vernon poled his skiff to within casting distance of a string of tarpon, just off the beach in an undisclosed location along the southern shores of North Carolina. His client, a Greensboro angler named Ben K
Garden & Gun8 min read
Winning Streak
They’ll be here in four minutes. We must leave now.” That was my dad talking on Labor Day evening in 1980. Summer lingered in the North Carolina air. We lived on a four-acre farm in Davie County, and my parents had company coming for supper and to wa
Garden & Gun4 min read
Florida Rewind
If the history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph,” writes Anne Hull, “it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians, the Calusa Indians, the Tocobaga Indians, Ponce de Léon, runaway slaves, snuff-dipping w
Garden & Gun4 min read
Flying Blind
My dream to become a pilot came true in 1966, at the beginning of a five-year stint in the air force. I was twenty-two. Two decades later, I kept the pilot dream alive by buying a 1946 Piper taildragger that I named Annabelle. During all my airplane
Garden & Gun3 min read
Petal To The Metal
Sydni Gause begins her mornings in her organic garden, pinching flowers to encourage bushiness, watering, fertilizing, and fighting off pests. Then the Panama City, Florida, artist collects mature specimens, including scabiosa and hibiscus, and heads
Garden & Gun3 min read
Prime Time
Cameron Weiss makes watches in what used to be a printshop, a family business that produced labels for vinyl records by the most famous bands on earth. Before its building became Weiss Watch Company, Hamlett Printing Service created the lettering des
Garden & Gun3 min read
Paint It Red
Chef Malyna Si loves even the tiniest detail. When she isn’t running Capa, the Michelin-starred Spanish-influenced steak house at the Four Seasons Resort in Orlando, Florida, she puts her degree in sculpture from the Academy of Art University in San
Garden & Gun3 min read
Peach Of An Idea
Yield: 1 cocktail 1½ oz. mezcal ¾ oz. lemon juice ¾ oz. smoked peach tea simple syrup* 1 egg white 1 peach slice, dried or fresh, for garnish Place first 4 ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice and shake for 20 seconds to emuls
Garden & Gun3 min read
Otherworldly Squash
The first thing Steven Satterfield noticed about the pattypan squash was, of course, its UFO-like appearance. “There were a few local farmers that were growing these varieties back in the aughts, and I was immediately curious about this flying-saucer
Garden & Gun2 min read
Cask Strength
One of the boys: “I kept finding myself in places where women usually weren’t. I studied auto shop in high school, then studied chemical engineering before doing research and tasting at [spirits and wine company] Brown-Forman. Then came the career-ch
Garden & Gun4 min read
Stuffed in Little Rock
The smell of nixtamalized corn from the next-door tortilleria swirls the parking lot at Gorditas Paty in the southwestern suburbs of Little Rock. Corrugated tin wainscoting lines the walls of this bright and beautiful restaurant, the second of four l
Garden & Gun2 min read
Almost Paradise
Welcome warblers and wrens to cool off in this stately cast-stone bath from the Williamsburg collection by Campania, seen here with a vintage bird statue—every piece nods to Virginia antiques and the timeless lines of eighteenth-century gardens ($400
Garden & Gun3 min read
Light In The Attic
Long before people could brighten a photo with the tap of a smartphone, Rembrandt demonstrated the sweep of sun and shadow across a face, Caravaggio the drama of ivory light against inky darkness, and Vermeer the illuminating qualities of a rustic wi
Garden & Gun3 min read
Meant to Bee
Eden Bishop remembers playing in her great-grandmother Lida’s Smoky Mountains garden as a child. Lida’s 1911 home, called Rostrevor, stood as a crown jewel of Knoxville, Tennessee, with a sunken Italian garden, terraced lawn, and columned patio lined
Garden & Gun5 min read
Training for Dummies
When I was a boy in Mississippi, my father had a dream to breed Labs for duck hunting, which I very much supported, for up until then, I was the family retriever. He made me slog into icy bayous at sunrise to fetch the dead birds, the water leaking i
Garden & Gun6 min read
Butterfly Effect
Each week I drive the back roads between my home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, where I currently teach, byways I have known for as long as I’ve been alive. The plots of trees along them served as landmarks for eight-year-old m
Garden & Gun9 min read
Castaway Experience
IF YOU’RE THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO’D ENJOY hiking several miles into an overlush Caribbean rain forest, tramping up and down enough mountains and ridges to make your route resemble a seismograph reading, then wandering an ashy, hissing ruinscape where
Garden & Gun4 min read
Back In The Ring
In a world where I can click my way to a MasterClass on topics as varied as how to think like an FBI profiler, how to make a concrete bench out of sand, and how to dribble like Steph Curry from Steph Curry, it’s outrageous that I can’t find a virtual
Garden & Gun5 min read
Cruising The Coastal Highway
ASK SOUTHERN MOTORCYCLISTS ABOUT THEIR favorite rides, and a few storied names are sure to cross their lips: the Natchez Trace Parkway, the Cherohala Skyway, the Tail of the Dragon, and the Blue Ridge Parkway, among others. Today, however, I’d like t
Garden & Gun6 min read
Riding High
CATALOOCHEE RANCH, WHERE OUR ADVENTURE BE- gins, is the kind of magical mountainous resort you’ve heard about but may never have truly believed existed, a mythic horse paradise with amazing food, unbelievable views, and romantic cabins. It’s right ab
Garden & Gun16 min read
Lucinda Transcending
LUCINDA WILLIAMS DOESN’T REMEMBER A LOT ABOUT THAT AFTERNOON. It was November 17, 2020, and the acclaimed singer-songwriter and her husband of eleven years, Tom Overby, had been quarantined in their East Nashville bungalow since March. Williams was u
Garden & Gun6 min read
All Downhill From Here
WHEN I TURNED THIRTY-FIVE AND MY KNEES began cracking like glow sticks every time I climbed the stairs, I decided it was time to give my joints a break from running and take up cycling. Then I managed to befriend Jennah, a former elite cyclist in my
Garden & Gun16 min read
Chasing The Swamp Ghost
The STRUGGLE to PROVE the MAJESTIC IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER STILL EXISTS HAS OBSESSED BELIEVERS and EXASPERATED DOUBTERS for a CENTURY. NOW PHOTOGRAPHER BOBBY HARRISON is RACING to DOCUMENT the BIRD ONCE and for ALL BEFORE the GOVERNMENT DECLARES IT E
Garden & Gun12 min read
Take Me To The River
It is not yet 11:00 a.m., less than an hour into our float, and Rose (not her real name) is hauling in the trout. A teenager with long brunette hair and a happy, resolute face, she stands in the bow of the drift boat wearing big pink sunglasses and c
Garden & Gun4 min read
I Won’t Drive, Don’t Ask Me
My editor said, “Helen, I can’t believe you ever hitchhiked!” “It was the summer of ’89,” I said. “Oh,” she said, “that’s the year I was born.” In 1989, I was a camp counselor in Upstate New York. I canoed. I color-warred. I wrestled in short shorts
Garden & Gun6 min read
Beer for All
A beer bar can take many forms. It can be a center of craft where tourists dip a toe in the local scene, a way station where regulars encounter beers from across the country, or a port where tipplers welcome rare imports. It can be a gastropub with a
Garden & Gun5 min read
Fortress Of The Mind
Shell Beach is about a forty-minute drive from my home in New Orleans. It’s not really a beach nor does it have much in the way of shells, but it’s where fishermen slap their rods at the water and where kayakers like me can launch to paddle across a
Garden & Gun1 min read
Rib Tips
Charlie Vergos didn’t invent barbecue ribs when he opened Rendezvous in downtown Memphis in 1948, but he did make them iconic. “You can smell them barbecuing from the Peabody hotel,” says Robert Stewart Jr., who for the last four decades has worked a
Garden & Gun3 min read
One Chunk At A Time
This, I’m told, is this issue’s loose theme: “Off the beaten path.” Okay. It’s not as though my mind is teeming with themes, and it’s always nice to fit in. So I free-associate: “Off the…hmm. Beaten…path…hmm.” And I come up with… Oh no! Not that! I c
Garden & Gun10 min read
The Southern Agenda GOINGS-ON IN THE SOUTH & BEYOND
While a Tyrannosaurus rex greets visitors at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and an eleven-ton elephant guards the entry at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Charleston Museum welcomes guests in a decidedly Lowcountry fashion, w

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