Indholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2025 i Garden & Gun

.01 SPECIAL FEATURE Introducing the Southern Bucket List Book a stay at a cocktail lover’s dream hotel in Savannah. Take a guided bike ride through the Arkansas Ozarks. Eat Michelin-starred barbecue in Texas, and grab a seat for the Grand Ole Opry’s hundredth birthday. A compendium for those with a sense of wanderlust, G&G’s Bucket List includes fifty inviting places, events, and adventures to soak up the South in 2025, with insider tips for making the most of your trip. ON THE LIST ■ Stay in the historic home of Kentucky bourbon royalty ■ Tag a bonefish in one of the Yucatán’s famed biosphere reserves ■ See the stunning new sculpture park in Montgomery, Alabama ONLINE BEGINNING MARCH 25 AT: gardenandgun.com/bucketlist .02 BRACKET Vote Now: The Great Steak House…

“That is the essence and magic of dogs—that God backward thing, and all” BIG EASY BUCKET LIST The February/March 2025 issue on New Orleans was beautiful and had perfect timing. Be a New Orleanian wherever you are! Heather HulingFairfax, Virginia I first heard about Dakar NOLA and its remarkable chef, Serigne Mbaye, in your April/May 2023 issue, and I put it on my travel list as a must-visit. I finally got to go last year, and the food was better than I imagined. I’ve lived and eaten in Los Angeles, Japan, Dallas, and Austin, among other places, but this experience and food were the best I have ever had—don’t tell my grandmother. Derrick WalkerAustin, Texas GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN Thank you for publishing David Joy’s “Beyond the Grave” (Good Dog,…

It’s barely dawn when the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s conservation team arrives with their new colleague, DJ, at the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. The recruit is partially responsible for the early start: Even in the mountains, DJ, a six-year-old Belgian Malinois, has a hard time with the June heat. When the group reaches its research site in the forest, DJ gets to work, trotting unleashed between ferns and moss-covered trees with tail aloft and ears pricked. His trainer, the biologist Karen DeMatteo, follows his zigs and zags. Suddenly, the dog’s pace slows, his muscles tense, and his black snout hovers near the ground. He lies down and looks at DeMatteo. In front of his paws, several inches deep in the dirt, hides the root of the elusive orchid the team is training…

Was Mark Twain (1835–1910) a Southern writer? He was born into a slaveholding family in Missouri, joined a Confederate militia during the Civil War, and often wrote about the South, most famously in his masterful Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most folks nowadays—picturing the drawling Twain in his white linen suit, like a bookish Colonel Sanders—would answer yes. But Twain’s contemporaries didn’t think so, nor did scholars for half a century after his death. The 1895 Southern Literature: From 1579–1895, for example, inventoried nine hundred writers, but Twain wasn’t among them. Likewise, the Library of Southern Literature (1907) couldn’t find room for a mention in its original fourteen volumes and 6,560 pages. The editors of The Literature of the South (1952) tried explaining his absence thisaway: “Although the South molded Twain…

The noisy crowd on the Birmingham sidewalk turns reverent as they pass through Last Call Baking Company’s dusty-pink door, bound for a case stacked with croissants baked until they turn a deep shade of mahogany. Carrying a cup of coffee from up the street, I follow. As the morning line shrinks and the stock of pastries does, too, we ask one another, Are they out of coffee scrolls? How many cheese biscuits are left? Ralph Wooten and his wife are on their way to his chemotherapy appointment at nearby UAB Medical Center. “I wanted to start my day with a treat,” he tells me, gesturing to a brown paper bag stamped with Last Call’s neo-Gothic logo and stuffed with a caramel-domed and sea salt–sprinkled kouign-amann, a pastry of traditional French…

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORE OPENING GAMBIT The upholstered game table and swivel chairs by North Carolina’s Coley Home (starting at $2,100 and $700 each, respectively; coleyhome.com) come in dozens of fabrics. A custom-cut piece of glass atop the table makes for easy playing with this vibrant lacquered chess set by Printworks ($165; printworksmarket.us). CONVERSATION PIECES Display-worthy board games abound nowadays, including these handsome Printworks (printworksmarket.us) versions of Chinese checkers (near right, $59) and Kalaha (bottom right, $65), Serena & Lily’s backgammon set (top right, $498; serenaandlily.com), and Mark and Graham’s take on mah-jongg ($299; markandgraham.com). WINNING TURN How’s this for clever (and chic)? All fifteen classic board games in this Anthropologie set nestle in boxes that look like vintage books in a rainbow of cloth…

No. 01 REMEMBER: THE WHOLE POINT IS TO HAVE FUN Take a deep breath and put out the welcome mat FROM YOUR HOST Helen Ellis Don’t freak out. When planning a party, don’t waste your time worrying. I promise you, you’re going to screw something up, something’s going to go wrong, someone’s going to do something, and that’s all there is to it. Embrace the disgrace. You’re not going to buy enough bags of ice or you’re going to buy too many bags of ice, and the one leftover bag will loaf like an AP Biology fetal pig in your freezer for months until you man up and sentence it to death by melting at a glacial pace in your sink. You’re not going to buy enough booze or you’re…

Let’s Party ONE CHEF’S PORKY SECRET TO BRINGING THE FUN As parlor tricks go, chef William Dissen’s country ham bourbon luge might just be untouchable. At a recent gathering of Garden & Gun Society members at North Carolina’s Cataloochee Ranch, Dissen unveiled his party pièce de résistance to the delight of the crowd. Inspired by the ice luge and jungle juice combo of his rowdy West Virginia University days, Dissen, the acclaimed chef at the Market Place restaurant in Asheville, carves a groove down the center of a Benton’s aged ham, grabs a good bourbon, and pours a shot down the chute into a short glass. He came up with the idea many years ago when he hosted a tribute dinner for his good friend—“and the nicest human being alive”—Allan…

WE ASKED... What’s your top hosting tip? In our Talk of the South newsletter, readers gave their best party-throwing advice. Buy premade mini desserts from the store and put them on pretty platters with some fruit as filler. Save the fussiness for a favorite family dish or something you make really well. Christa F. Ruth Fertel of Ruth’s Chris Steak House said it best: Greet them by name with a friendly, strong drink. David B. Put the clocks away. Kate M. Take a cocktail order at the porch. If a guest has to walk through twenty people to get a drink, they’ll never get there. Bruce M. Give your guests free rein in the kitchen. My friends do a rotating potluck, and we all just act like we’re at home…

It’s a “no-brainer,” Anslo Fowler says. “I wouldn’t hunt wild turkeys with anything but an over-and-under shotgun.” The North Carolina native has been chasing gobblers since the mid-nineties, when the state’s first modern wild turkey seasons opened. Like many, he started off with autoloading shotguns, which seemed like the way to go with their quick follow-up shot capacities. But a couple of times while crawling through brush, he accidentally bumped the shot actions open just a bit, leading to misfires. And he missed a couple of turkeys that snuck in on him at around fifteen yards away. A single-barreled semiauto fitted with an extra full choke leaves little margin for error at close range. An avid quail hunter and dog trainer, Fowler picked up his 12-gauge over-and-under for a turkey…

When a couple of Los Angeles–based equestrians began searching for a rural retreat outside California, Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee, arose as a perfect fit. Remote enough to have plenty of acreage for the family’s aging horses to retire, but not so far removed that travel might become burdensome, the historic village just outside of Nashville immediately seemed familiar. Drawn to the rolling hills and lush pastures of Tennessee’s horse country, the pair ultimately purchased a twenty-eight-acre spread anchored by a 1990s farmhouse. For the needed refresh, they turned to their longtime design partners, Todd Nickey and Amy Kehoe, owners of the renowned L.A. design firm and furnishings retailer Nickey Kehoe, whose soulfully layered style has earned them a host of A-list clients, including Kirsten Dunst and Sarah Paulson. “We’ve worked with…

YOU MAY OR MAY NOT BE IMPRESSED that I took third place in the junior division of the 1975 North Carolina wild turkey calling championships. I will tell you that it wasn’t easy standing on the stage of a darkened high school auditorium, at age fourteen, a city kid in a cavernous assembly room full of Carhartt coats, camouflage pants, and seed company ball caps. I stood alone on the stage as the contest judges called out my instructions in disembodied voices emanating from the gloom: “Gobble.” “Yelp.” “Putt.” I did my best with a box call, the sweat from my hands wetting the call’s wooden sides. I’d never been more nervous in my life, not even when I’d been forced to sing “The Little Drummer Boy” as a solo…

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOUL You can reach Sapelo Island only by a ferry that leaves three times a day (and just twice on Sundays) from small-town Meridian, Georgia, in the marshy wilds between Savannah and Brunswick. Travelers enter from the twenty-first-century rural South and emerge after the twenty-minute crossing into another world—one simultaneously haunting and more than probably haunted. I perhaps first heard of Sapelo while reading Servants of Allah, by Sylviane A. Diouf, which describes how the island was home to a Muslim community during the period of enslavement. I would hear of it again when studying Sea Island red peas and their resurgence thanks to the work of Bill Thomas (a.k.a. Doc Bill) and the late Cornelia Walker Bailey, a Sapelo resident. The island would…

Biscuits and Banjos Durham, North Carolina Masterminded by the Pulitzer Prize– and Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, this brand-new festival kicks off April 25–27 at venues across town, including the Durham Performing Arts Center and Carolina Theater. The three-day event celebrates Black performers such as Christian McBride and Rissi Palmer, spotlighting country, Americana, folk, jazz, and blues. Artist workshops and author readings will further connect traditions—plus there’s a biscuit-baking contest. Gamble Rogers Folk Festival St. Augustine, Florida By the time he died in 1991, the Floridian Gamble Rogers had left an indelible mark on folk music. Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year, the Gamble Rogers Folk Festival (April 11–13) at the St. Johns County Fairgrounds hosts a lineup of acts carrying on the spirit of Rogers’s storytelling, writing, and impact on…

Mac Stone PHOTOGRAPHER Mac Stone’s career as a conservation photographer has put him face-to-face with Florida panthers, thousand-year-old cypress trees, and snail kites. For “Red Wolves Rising” (p. 130), he spent six days in Eastern North Carolina following one of the South’s most endangered species. “You have this bare-bones crew working at fever pitch to save a species that most of the public doesn’t even know about,” he says. “I felt incredibly lucky to have seen red wolves in the wild.” The Florida native, who now lives in Greenville, South Carolina, is currently at work on a two-part PBS documentary celebrating Southeastern biodiversity, and a book born from a National Geographic assignment on the mystery of old-growth swamps. “I felt incredibly lucky to have seen red wolves in the wild”…

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTURE One evening when the fashion designer Christy Lynn Lee was a child, she grew tired of doodling on the printer paper her mother had given her and her little sister, Vickie, and took to the walls of her family’s small Chicago apartment instead. “I drew floor-to-ceiling flowers, rainbows, birds, you name it,” Lee recalls. “My parents were so upset that they immediately called the super to paint it back white. Apparently, they had to repaint several times because I kept drawing.” That vivid imagination has served her well: These days, Lee uses it to dream up pieces for her Texas-based clothing line, Christy Lynn. Her collection revels in juxtapositions, from undulating floral dresses paired with structured jackets to perfectly draped Italian crepe suiting in pastels…

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINK For chef Julia Sullivan, a Nashville native, the pink-fleshed trout that swim in mountain streams are a gift to Southern cooks. But for those of us who don’t get to keep a line wet, local farm-raised trout stand in quite nicely. They’re a constant at her restaurant Judith, which she opened last December in Sewanee, Tennessee. “We love to serve whole trout because we are seafood people,” she says. Sullivan’s résumé includes Thomas Keller’s Per Se and Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns, two restaurants considered among New York’s best. In 2017, she opened Henrietta Red in Nashville. Food critics and diners alike swooned over her modern, seafood-forward menu. She designed Judith to be a little homier for people who might not…

Name a state in the South that lacks a city, town, or county honoring Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. I’ll wait. The atlas says Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Texas, and Florida all have places named Lafayette (or in some cases LaFayette). In Alabama, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas you’ll find Fayettes or Fayettevilles. (Congratulations if you said South Carolina, which is inexplicably devoid of such a tribute, though the state does have plenty of Lafayette streets.) The Marquis de Lafayette, you’ll no doubt recall from middle school history, was a French aristocrat who became a hero in the American Revolution—he was just nineteen when he arrived here and acquitted himself with distinction on fields of battle. He was held in such esteem…

When the light filters just so through the windows of Wentworth, a new entertaining and home goods shop in Charleston, South Carolina, it glints off stacks of speckleware bowls and refracts through Lobmeyr crystal candy dishes lined up like soldiers in a glass cabinet. Nearby, scagliola lamps made by Christopher Wall in Worcestershire, England, face off against lampshades hand painted by the Spanish artist Alvaro Picardo, and five-piece sets of silverware look out from display cases like gems in a jewelry store. A library of candy-colored taper candles hangs behind the hardy wood register. This mélange of treasures would look right at home in a Paris flea market stall or a shop on London’s Portobello Road. Indeed, “I wanted it to feel like something that you would see in New…