Garden & Gun

Calida Rawles’s hyperrealistic paintings depict Black people submerged in water, swimming, or floating. For Rawles, giving one’s body over to water represents the ultimate form of surrender—one she came to later in life. Rawles grew up in Wilmington,

Dennis Quaid’s nearly fifty-year career is marked by both its prolificacy and its high quality. The actor has performed in more than eighty films and ten-plus television shows, including memorable roles in The Rookie, The Right Stuff, The Big Easy, T

There’s a little place I hunt, a pocket-sized beaver swamp with duckweed-spangled water and a canopy of flooded timber hung with mistletoe that is so fetching, so postcard perfect, that I blame its primeval charms for prompting an uncharacteristic de

Anyone who needs proof that biscuits are the South’s quintessential foodstuff need only crack a book. You’ll find them, “brownhued,” in the work of Thomas Wolfe as well as tucked into a paper sack with a tin of sardines in that of Flannery O’Connor.

Whew! This is a delicate dilemma and depends on two things: 1. How well do you know these people? And 2. How well do they know Emily Post? Because despite how we may feel about our rivals, good manners are sports agnostic. Handing off precious season

On a trip to California in the nineties, chef John Fleer plucked and ate an olive right off the tree. “Bad idea!” says Fleer, the executive chef and owner of Rhubarb in Asheville. “It was astringent, bitter, and overly firm. I couldn’t believe anyone

I am sitting on a veranda in the North Carolina highlands. It’s not yet fall, but there’s a cool tang to the air. I am about to go inside for a sweater, and I plan to return with a cocktail, something both refreshing and warming. A drink, say, Truman

Watergate Salad, Shut the Gate Salad, Green Stuff, Pink Stuff, Orange Stuff, Mean Green, Golden Gate Salad, Goop, Fluff, Pistachio Delight. These were the words that set the hook when I started researching what I have come to call, affectionately (bu

Among the many fierce and tangled debates about Southern food, banana pudding offers a clear line of demarcation: Either you like it cold, or you like it warm. Chef Rob McDaniel, who owns Helen in Birmingham with his wife, Emily, is a warm pudding gu

On the day last April when a vintage pair of Air Jordan sneakers, previously worn by basketball icon Michael Jordan himself, sold at Sotheby’s auction house for an astounding $2.2 million, chef Travis Milton was sporting a pair pulled from his own co

“Say hello to your new best friends,” says a guy in a blue suit with a lanyard around his neck. Just past noon, the front bar at Pêche, set in a mansard-roofed corner building walking distance from the New Orleans convention center, is packed tighter

The delicate hellebores open first, in late winter, and then come the tulips in Dee Hall’s garden in Norfolk, Virginia. The Tidewater region’s warm climate soon ushers in ranunculus and peonies, and by late summer, dahlias put on their big-bloom show

Some stories begin at the end. This ending begins with me standing in a Georgia swamp, a place we call the Buzzard Roost, twin barrels smoking and tears dropping into the water. Three sons staring at their father, not knowing what to say. A braced pa

■ Winding white diamonds create the pavé design of this feminine eighteen-karat-gold piece by former dancer and jewelry designer Jamie Wolf ($4,000; elizabethbruns.com). ■ A rainbow of multicolored sapphires pop in Brent Neale’s ultra-bold eighteen-k

With the trophy fishing? The majestic bush plane flights? The king crab and Wagyu feast? The deluxe-rustic lodge? The incident with the twenty-five-pound salmon? The bears? The poem? I’ll start with the fishing. I was wading American Creek, in Alaska

On our drive home to Deep Run one afternoon, as I hugged the inside lane of the “bad curve” on John Green Smith Road, a wrinkled gentleman subtly raised his index finger and tipped his cap as his nineties-model Ford pickup puttered past. With a muscl

Plus: GET THE CHEFS’ PARTY PLAYLISTS Scan the QR code to get Southern Soul’s tailgate playlist, including picks from former Georgia QB Stetson Bennett. On college game days—specifically when the Georgia Bulldogs are playing—Southern Soul Barbeque, on

Down in the heart of Georgia, where the hilly Piedmont plateau meets the flat Coastal Plain, the Ocmulgee River bends through the landscape. Along those riverbanks, a civilization emerged, and for at least twelve thousand years, Indigenous tribes hav

Nutritionists aren’t kidding when they tout breakfast as the most important meal of the day. Of course, the pros have glucose levels in mind when they advise against starting on an empty stomach. But an added benefit of seeking out a country ham bisc

It’s a Tuesday night in September, and the North Myrtle Beach shag club Fat Harold’s teems with leather-tanned men and dyed-blonde women reliving the time of their lives on the dance floor. Mott Free spots Kaleb Brown, a friend of her grandson Grayso

LEE SMITH GLIDES THROUGH THE POURING RAIN, her distinctive laugh curling out behind her. Once she reaches the back stoop of her antebellum house in downtown Hillsborough, North Carolina, she shakes a spray of droplets from her hair and wipes water fr

Tom Rosenbauer is standing by my side as we gaze over a pretty, meadow-lined stretch of Vermont’s Battenkill River. “Get your fly tight to the other bank,” he tells me, pointing across the water. “Then let it sink a bit and start stripping it.” We’re

STEWART COUNTY, GEORGIA Near the end of summer, the floor of Providence Canyon blazes deep scarlet when the plumleaf azalea—the rarest azalea in the eastern United States—bursts into fiery splendor. “It blooms after everything else is finished,” says

When I say I have a home in the French Quarter of New Orleans, some people look at me askance. What is it like, they wonder, to live and walk around in such a place? These people need some perspective, if you ask me, on living and walking around anyw

Come August in the Osage Hills of Oklahoma, Maximilian sunflowers bloom yellow. Cleansing prescribed fires crackle across grasslands filled with big and little bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass. Greater prairie chickens chuckle from the ground;

One evening in May, Rhiannon Giddens was taking a walk near her home in southern Ireland. The stroll had become a nightly ritual, a way to clear her head after helping her two children get ready for bed. This night was special. A tweet popped up on h