Indholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2023 i Garden & Gun

During my time in New York City as a magazine editor, I found ways to keep myself rooted in the natural world. I fished on weekends in Long Island Sound (and even occasionally before work in the Hudson River), spread birdseed on my windowsill so the grackles would fill my room with bird chatter in the morning and drown out the ever-present sirens and the wailing of street preachers, and even gardened. Well, gardened might be a stretch. But each summer, in a show of even more optimism than required of your average gardener, I’d plant a few veggies in pots on my tenth-floor fire escape. It wasn’t an easy go for the plants. Surrounding apartment buildings often blotted out the sun. Every now and then someone in one of…

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 Capote might enjoy. What should that be? Actually, I am not on a mountain veranda. I’m in my office in New Orleans, and it’s early summer and humid. But the prompt above is what I fed into the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, which uses what’s called a “large language model” to devise responses and mimic human interactions. Until last year, as far as I was concerned, “large language model” chiefly referred to William Faulkner’s prose. Now it’s the next thing in…

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORE IN THE GARDEN 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. Four years ago, when Hall tried to find local flowers for her wedding, she came up empty-handed. An idea sprouted as she remembered the Caribbean gardens of her grandmother and great-grandmother, in St. Lucia. “Gardens have always been part of my life,” she says. “The sense of wonder and excitement never goes away.” On the bit of earth around her house, she started with a base of pollinator-friendly native plants and layered in colorful yarrow, snapdragons, and…

Crossing the narrow bridge over Callawassie Creek that leads from Okatie, South Carolina, to Spring Island feels like driving over a Narnian threshold to wonder. Old-growth maritime forests of live oaks and tall pines dapple sunlight onto the understory saw palmettos and the two-lane below. Spanish moss, cast like one massive shrimp net, drapes everything. Amid this primordial landscape unmarred by billboards or commercial buildings, a small sign announcing FOX SQUIRREL CROSSING is about the only hint of civilization. Yes, even the squirrels here are of a different order. “We were awestruck by the beauty,” says Nancy Serafini, a Bostonian who, with her husband, Joe, began visiting the Lowcountry twenty-some years ago. After numerous stays at the nearby Chechessee Creek Club, they decided to look for a more permanent foothold,…

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 in Manchester, my favorite place to get away during the dog days of summer, where the quickening cool of mountain air replaces stagnant heat. When Rosenbauer talks about fly fishing, I listen. I’m not the only one. Through his popular podcast, books, and videos, he has arguably become the sport’s most influential teacher and promoter. His official title at Orvis—which is headquartered just a few miles away and where he has worked for the past forty-seven years—is Chief Fly-Fishing Enthusiast. Even now, at a whiskered…

Silas House WRITER Silas House has written seven novels, including Lark Ascending, which won the 2023 Southern Book Prize. He became Kentucky’s poet laureate earlier this year, cementing his status as a modern titan of Southern literature. For this issue, he profiled one of his own heroes, the heralded Virginia-raised author Lee Smith (p. 120), who has written fifteen novels and has served as a mentor to House for more than two decades. “I want people to read the article and feel like they have spent time with her,” House says, “and come away knowing her differently than they might have by just reading her books.” Amanda Heckert WRITER When Amanda Heckert stepped into Fat Harold’s Beach Club in North Myrtle Beach last September to begin reporting “Save the Last…

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; coyotes on the hunt howl. And the rumbles of wild American bison echo day and night, as a herd more than two thousand strong engages in the rituals that will perpetuate their kind—all of it a scene that came perilously close to flickering out. The historical range of the American bison (sometimes called buffalo), the largest land animal in the Western Hemisphere, once touched every present-day Southern state, and herds traversed the prairies left by retreating glaciers in unthinkable abundance—an estimated sixty million—following new growth that flourished after fires started by lightning strikes or Native…

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 guy. He grew up in Haleyville, a town of about 4,300 people in northern Alabama. Both his grandmothers made warm banana pudding. They’d layer cookies and warm custard with banana slices in a Pyrex dish, then top it with egg whites and sugar whipped into a simple meringue. “If I had cold banana pudding, it was because it had been sitting on the counter and it was later after lunch,” he says. “When I eat cold pudding, I think of one of those pudding cups.” When…

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 copious and valuable collection of Jordans, and most likely dripping gravy all over them. Milton, the chef at Hickory, a farm-to-table restaurant at Nicewonder Farm & Vineyards in Bristol, Virginia, has built his reputation on proudly showcasing the ingredients and traditions of Appalachian cuisine. While racking up accolades, he’s also been compulsively amassing squadrons of Air Jordans, the coveted basketball shoes Nike first introduced in 1985. Indeed, his hoard, currently hovering around 450 pairs, would be the envy of any sneaker-head, as those in the avid shoe-collecting community…

GARDEN & GUN PRESENTS: Plus: GET THE CHEFS’ PARTY PLAYLISTS Party Tunes Scan the QR code to get Southern Soul’s tailgate playlist, including picks from former Georgia QB Stetson Bennett. The Tailgate On college game days—specifically when the Georgia Bulldogs are playing—Southern Soul Barbeque, on St. Simons Island, is packed with fans of football and food. Starting in the morning, bar manager Sophie Kammer batches up drinks, like her Bulldog Smash, a Georgia-fied version of a Bahamian classic. Meanwhile, co-owners Griffin Bufkin and Harrison Sapp fire up a rotating selection of game-day eats, including grilled chicken wings, slathered in a Cheerwine-based barbecue sauce, and smoked fish dip, a local favorite. “The game is blasted on all the TVs as everyone settles in for a good time,” Bufkin says. It’s…

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 from her face. “Oh, Lord, that was magic!” she will recall later, even though now she is drenched by the cold cloudburst that is still pummeling the ground. I’ve long noticed how she seems to find the positive in every situation. I see joy in her vivid blue eyes. There’s a hint of mischief in them, and in that smile that overtakes her whole face. She’s known for her kindness, but also for her tenacity. She punctuates the occasional curse word she drops with a gleeful brow lift that…

“I just know there’s a pair of ivorybills out there, somewhere” SCENIC ROUTES We got on U.S. Highway 17 in Winchester, Virginia, its northernmost point, and took it all the way home over six days (“The Art of Adventure,” June/July 2023). A wonderful drive! This fall we hope to finish the route: St. Simons to Punta Gorda, Florida. Miriam Lancaster St. Simons Island, Georgia Many late nights when I lived in New Orleans and had trouble sleeping, I would ride the streetcar on St. Charles and go to Magnolia Grill. Then I’d get back on, ride to the end of the line, “flip the seats,” and go back to the Quarter. Jim Mambourg Morro Bay, California KNOCK ON WOOD One of my favorite reads back in 1988 was James Kilgo’s…

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 decision on my part. Last year, standing in the swamp, I thought: I should hunt this place with hand-carved wooden decoys. This spot deserves something special. It was an uncharacteristic thought in that hand-carved wooden decoys have long seemed a luxury I didn’t want to pay for, and a literal burden I didn’t want to carry. But there was something about the swamp woods that morning that turned all of that on its head, so I called my friend Tom Boozer, a decoy carver from Yonges Island, South Carolina. I ordered…

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 had ever been able to figure out how to make olives delicious.” That moment came back to him several years ago when his go-to farmer at Gaining Ground Farm, just outside of Asheville, was picking the last remaining red cherry tomatoes at the end of summer before ripping out the sun-spent plants to make room for fall crops. “It struck me that there would be a lot of unripe tomatoes still on those plants,” Fleer says. Rather than let them go to waste, he decided to…

■ 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-karat-gold knot ring ($5,950; shop-capitol.com). ■ It’s not hard to see why Boochier calls this eighteen-karat-gold spiral dome look the Jumbo Slinkee Ring ($3,340; tinygods.com). ■ A clever trundle lock gives this Akoya pearl design by Marla Aaron the ability to open and close, allowing it to be worn on the finger or on a chain as a charm holder ($4,559; croghansjewelbox.com). ■ Goshwara’s pale green prasiolite and eighteen-karat-gold cocktail ring packs a gorgeous wallop of style ($2,600; tinygods.com). ■ Undulating Southern seagrass inspired the Texas jewelry designer Julie Cohn’s petite wax-cast bronze bangle ($395; ggfieldshop.com).…

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 biscuit, catfish Benedict, or eggs and rice is getting acquainted with the place that produced it. ¶ Restaurants that specialize in breakfast crack open a window to their communities and give visiting eaters a chance to get to know the people who enliven them. A tasting menu restaurant might be trendy, but breakfast joints are the real deal for local flavor if you’re visiting a new town—folks don’t put on airs when they go out for breakfast. Get a taste of what the regulars come back for…