Indholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2023 i Garden & Gun

Patsy. Loretta. Dolly. Miranda. She probably wouldn’t put herself on that country music Mount Rushmore, but hear me out: Since blazing onto the scene with her hell-raising albums Kerosene and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Miranda Lambert has proved she has the old-school chops of Patsy Cline, the fire and grit of Loretta Lynn, and the buoyant effervescence of Dolly Parton. In 2015, the flames lowered into a slow burn—Lambert and fellow country star Blake Shelton divorced, and she retreated to a small Nashville studio where she wrote and recorded The Weight of These Wings, a double album on which Lambert was at her most vulnerable and anguished. She never publicly addressed the drama with Shelton, telling me in 2016: “If you wanna hear my side of the story, it’s all on there,…

In a small painting room in central San Antonio, Brenda Kingery dances with her heritage. Like fallen feathers, photographs of Indian powwows lie scattered around the studio. Sunlight sifts through the louvered window shutters, brightening a table covered with Japanese brushes and acrylic paints. Here in this peaceful place, the eighty-three-year-old Chickasaw painter communes with her Native American identity, telling the stories of her ancestry and artistry through ribbons of color and washes of ink. While growing up in Oklahoma City, Kingery loved art, and she recalls drawing on the walls of her bedroom late into the night. That creative energy eventually led to a scholarship at the University of Oklahoma, where she studied fine arts and art history. By graduation, the young artist had married her husband, Tom, and…

Fredric McCann, an assistant football coach at Wayne County High, watches Rosebud Chaffin pull three burgers off the grill at Cooley’s Hamburgers, a hutch of a restaurant near the Alabama line in the small piney-woods town of Waynesboro, Mississippi. He wears gray sweats and a big smile. When McCann was a boy, his father bought him Cooley’s burgers after he chopped morning firewood or fed the cows and chickens. Now McCann, who also teaches high school students to navigate the pulpwood-truck-clogged streets of Waynesboro, uses the alley and gravel parking lot here as a driver’s-ed course. When those students score well, parking in tight spaces, threading the narrow alley, he rewards them with burgers, crossed with crisp bacon strips, tucked into steamed buns, and dressed with mustard and ketchup and…

ONE SUNNY MORNING LAST FALL, Chuck Charnichart—arguably the top brisket cook working in Texas today—walked into Kreuz Market in Lockhart in a Lady Gaga T-shirt. ¶ Among the Texas barbecue faithful, Kreuz is well known as one of the no-frills German American meat markets where Hill Country–style barbecue originated. It’s an institution built on greasy butcher paper, along with the likes of the iconic Southside Market & Barbeque in Elgin and Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor. Opened in 1875 in Lockhart as Jesse Swearingen’s meat market, Kreuz moved to its current location—a barnlike building where smoke hangs over old-style brick pits—in 1999, after a dispute between siblings. Like other early Texas barbecue joints, Kreuz began as a grocery store where the owners smoked the meats they couldn’t sell, offering them…

S. C. Gwynne WRITER When New England native S. C. Gwynne moved to Texas nearly thirty years ago, he’d never anticipated the warm welcome he would receive. “They’ve always accepted me here,” says the Austin-based author and historian, who penned “The Heart of Texas” (p. 109) for this issue. “I don’t know if I’m technically a Texan yet, but I feel very much a part of this place.” The former Time correspondent and editor has spent the last decade delving into the periods and populations that have altered modern history. The author of Empire of the Summer Moon, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about the Comanche tribe’s influence on the American West, Gwynne has also written tomes on topics such as the Civil War’s final year and how football’s passing game…

It’s hard to picture today, as pleasure craft unhurriedly glide down the Potomac River, but by the 1790s, Alexandria, Virginia, reigned as one of the nation’s largest port cities. There, tall ships from the Iberian Peninsula, Great Britain, and the West Indies brought precious cargo, like molasses and rum, to the fledgling republic and loaded up in return wheat, rye, flour, and corn. To support its busy wharf, Alexandria became a center for wooden shipbuilding, an industry that thrived for the next hundred years. Today that past may seem relegated to a lone commemorative plaque on a pedestrian path along the city’s harbor. Unless, that is, your eye happens to drift to a curious red-timbered building floating on Old Town Alexandria’s waterfront, home base for a rare and unlikely community…

In 1935, at a literary conference in Baton Rouge, folklorist and scholar Benjamin Botkin looked out at an audience that included Robert Penn Warren and Randall Jarrell and declared that Southern poetry, as a distinct category, didn’t exist. “One of the things that strikes the outsider about Southern writing,” said Botkin, a native Bostonian living in Oklahoma, “is that as soon as one stops writing prose and becomes a poet, one ceases to be a Southerner and even poetic.” Rebuttals, if they came, were muted: grumbles here and there, maybe, handkerchiefs dabbing sweaty necks. Six decades later, in an essay, the Virginia poet Dave Smith tried wrestling with Botkin’s assessment but fell short of a pin. Was there anything to distinguish the Southern poet, Smith asked, from an American poet…

It’s one thing to share recipes across generations. It’s another to discover a link between a recipe you made for dinner last night and one a cook prepared centuries ago. That’s, in part, the work Carla Burgos has taken on at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For the past three years, Burgos, a graduate student, has been transcribing historic culinary manuscripts contained in the university’s Mexican cookbook collection. With more than two thousand titles in English and Spanish and some manuscripts dating back to 1789, the archive is considered the largest of its kind in the country. Born in Santiago, Chile, Burgos moved to Texas when she was ten. She began burrowing into the collection’s handwritten recipes for her thesis and for the library, which is working to…

In 1866 a writer referred to falernum as the “drink of contradictions.” No explanation followed. Still, this makes sense. The liqueur version, essentially a blend of lime and sugar, with rum added to preserve it, has been around since the seventeenth century—“one of the earliest liqueurs made,” explains Richard Seale, a Barbados rum distiller who produces the historic John D. Taylor’s Velvet Falernum—but has stayed largely hidden in the shadows of cocktail culture. It is shy but can be very bossy when it makes a cameo in a drink. It is tropical but has traveled far and wide. Recipes vary, but falernum, which developed as a syrup and then a liqueur in the Caribbean, typically gets infused with lime zest and a handful of spices (including clove), along with ginger…

At the new Los Angeles outpost of the Nashville-born leather atelier Savas, one need only tug the leather tassel doorbell and push through the glass-and-brass door to enter the alluring imagination of Savannah Yarborough. The company’s founder and creative director, Yarborough made her name crafting rugged yet precisely executed, personality-driven leather jackets. With tobacco calf suede coats dangling from disco-ball spinners and paper drape patterns illustrating the evolution of her designs in the window, the recently opened shop offers an unruffled oasis among the heat and clamor of Melrose Avenue. “I want you to feel like you’re entering into a new sphere,” Yarborough says. Like its glossy front windows that reflect the palm trees outside, Savas echoes West Hollywood. Velvet, brass, and marble accent the limewashed walls, which shift from…

GOOD DOG Driving toward Dallas, I began to write his obituary in my head. There he was, in the rearview mirror, starting to notice the landmarks that point the way to the vet’s office. He laid back his ears. He hid his paws. He probably thought it was another nail trim, his least favorite kind of outing. I worried it would be much worse, and my eyes welled up. Our home is quieter, a little less hairy, and a lot less cuddly today, I’d write on Facebook with an appropriate selection of photos from his better days. By God, Woodrow, it’s been one hell of a party. I’d named him after the Lonesome Dove character even before I’d officially signed the adoption agreement from a Dallas shelter. It had been…

Here’s a story about Texas: A friend of mine went to a supermarket in Austin to buy a pie. But when she got there, the pies, made by a company called Pam’s Pies, were sold out. She made inquiries. No, there were no more pies in the back room. No, there were no more deliveries that day. No, there was nothing they could do about it. They were sorry. My friend left her name anyway and went home to figure out what to do about dessert. An hour later the phone rang. “Hi, this is Pam,” said the cheery voice on the other end of the line. “I hear you need a pie.” Though this may seem like a very small story about a very small thing, it is actually…

THE BIG PICTURE FRIENDS AND FAMILY HAVE A HARD TIME BELIEVING ME when I tell them I love Houston. Maybe it’s because I lived in New York City for fourteen years and it didn’t seem like I was exactly roughing it. I dined at restaurants and wrote about them for a paycheck. Every other month, I slipped on my Gucci loafers and attended New York Philharmonic concerts. My tennis team practiced on the same courts as the pros vying for the U.S. Open title. For my fortieth birthday, I flew to Paris because it was cheaper than a flight to L.A. Are you feeling bad for me yet? This snippet of my Big Apple life, however, while true, feels like it’s been run through an Instagram filter. One year I…

Hospitality is big, big business in Texas, which boasts the most hotels of any Southern state (nationwide, it’s second only to California). But it’s not all new construction and city high-rises: Some of the state’s most notable and inviting additions have revitalized once-neglected historic spaces, preserving character and reenergizing downtowns. From an updated midcentury motel in Galveston with a can’t-miss bar, to a gorgeous sprawling estate in Austin, to a collection of nineteenth-century bungalows in Round Top, these hotels artfully merge Lone Star heritage with contemporary flair—and keep their soulfulness intact. THE GRAND RETREAT THE COMMODORE PERRY ESTATE Austin 1 Visiting the Commodore Perry Estate, part of the Auberge Resorts Collection, feels like being in two places at once. The 1928 Italianate mansion sits on ten acres in the heart…

A BIRD IN HAND I’ve never been compelled to write in about a story until reading “Hope on the Wing” (December 2022/January 2023), which was as majestic as it was moving. The incredible paintings by Charly Palmer drew me in; Latria Graham’s magical writing had me spellbound; and Rodney Stotts’s beautiful life of purpose, struggle, grief, and passion moved me to tears. Emily Mellen Orange, Texas I am eighty-three years old and have passionately hunted ducks for three-quarters of a century. T. Edward Nickens’s story “The Ducks of Home” (October/November 2022) really resonated with me. Both of my grandfathers started me duck hunting on marshes at duck clubs they had started in the 1930s. I now hunt with my sons and grandsons and my seven-year-old chocolate Lab that I trained…

At 3:00 a.m. during the roar of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Marisel López-Flores, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) project leader for the Puerto Rican parrot recovery program, received a text from an employee: “Tell my kids I love them.” The staffer was one of two who had stayed—as someone always does during storms—with the captive parrots in El Yunque National Forest, part of a decades-spanning effort that, despite innumerable setbacks, is ensuring the species’ survival. The Puerto Rican parrot, also called the iguaca, inspires that kind of devotion. Its brilliant green feathers unfold into teal blue during flight; a burst of red splashes above the beak; white-rimmed eyes punctuate the face. It’s the only parrot native to Puerto Rico—a descendant of South American parrots that arrived in the…

The note in the envelope read, “I.O.U. a greenhouse.” Jenny Lynn Bradley treasured the promise, a Christmas gift more than a decade ago from her husband, Waldo, and she let her daydreams wander. She mused on the greenhouse of her childhood, the one near Lake Rabun in the North Georgia mountains, where her grandfather tended dahlias. And she considered the grounds of her current home outside Savannah on Sylvan Island, tucked along the banks of Herb River. She now had the chance to design a glass-walled garden room there, a place to sprout seedlings in even the chilliest days of late winter. Bradley walked the property, scanning her collection of camellias and citrus in terra-cotta planters. As she started to scheme, “I had little places all over the yard with…

IT’S CALLEDTAMAULIPAN THORNSCRUB, this sheet of mesquite grove and wiry, briary, thorny chaparral brush. It covers much of the landscape from northeastern Mexico into the Gulf Coastal Plain of South Texas, a fifty-five-thousand-square-mile region of mostly thick cover, grading here and there into grasslands spiked with cacti. There’s just enough open ground that you can fool yourself into thinking you can make your way across and remain unspiked, unspined, and unthorned. Which might be possible if you were looking where you were going. But it’s much more difficult when you’re following a bird dog with a snout full of quail scent, which is the task at hand. Bobwhite quail love the thornscrub, as do white-tailed deer, javelinas, non-native nilgai antelope (an Indian species introduced on the King Ranch in the…

Though you can complete the one hundred miles between Key Largo and Key West in a couple of hours, last year my wife, Julie, and I marked off five full days to explore. We planned a slowpoke road trip, hunting down off-the-beaten-path Florida Keys restaurants, lodgings, and attractions. In other words, the Keys visitors often miss. We had a few guidelines for our search. Targets had to be off the main U.S. 1 drag, a.k.a. the Overseas Highway, or, in the case of Key West, off overhyped Duval Street. Or they had to offer something special despite an Overseas Highway address. “And anything with a billboard is off the list,” Julie suggested. Five days of meandering later, we had a deeper—and even better—impression of an archipelago we’d already grown to…