Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2022 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER An Oyster Tradition GATHERING BY THE FIRE AND MAKING MEMORIES AT A BEACH HOUSE BUILT FOR FAMILY DAVID DIBENEDETTO Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief I come from a family of four boys with no shortage of opinions on a lifetime of topics. The right and wrong way to train a gundog. Bourbon versus Scotch. The best trolling spread for yellowfin tuna. Getting up with the sun or sleeping in. But we all agree that when throwing an oyster roast, you can’t do much better than a couple of bushels of Beaufort clusters tossed over an open fire. And there’s no place we’d rather do that than on Fripp Island, South Carolina, where my parents built a modest house in the mid-eighties with the prescient goal of…

LETTERS “I start at the back, for some unknown reason, and read every issue from cover to cover” BRAGGING RIGHTS Rick Bragg can certainly take his place among the writers he extols in “Eating My Words” (December 2021/January 2022). I can’t count the quotable passages that ring true. Betty Lamb Birmingham, Alabama The piece by Rick Bragg left me hungry for more. It was a delightful intersection of writing about authors and food, though I’ll admit to some jealousy that Bragg was able to dine with these modern giants of Southern literature. Peter Holstead Davies Lynchburg, Virginia Rick Bragg’s story was a romp of a read, so much so that I had to put down the magazine and laugh out loud! He is such a gifted treasure for anyone who…

ARTS Arts and Sciences BRANDON BALLENGÉE INTERPRETS THE NATURAL WORLD IN THE LAB, ON CANVAS, AND BEYOND By C. Morgan Babst PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARIANNA MASSEY A hundred yards behind Brandon Ballengée’s art studio, in a former cane field near Lafayette, Louisiana, his dog lollops right over a snake. “Oooh, look at that! A black-masked racer!” says Ballengée—a biologist by training—in a thrilled whisper. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay,” he tells the snake, before it slithers into the forest of pecan, holly, persimmon, and pine. Four decades ago, these woods—home to tanagers and buntings, opossums and rice rats, coyotes and bobcats—were a monoculture, like the adjoining soy field turned prairie to which Ballengée and his family moved six years ago, fulfilling his dream of running a nature reserve. “There was nothing,”…

MUSIC Three Chords and the Kernal WITH VIVID STORYTELLING, SLY HUMOR, AND ONE LOUD SUIT, THE KERNAL BRINGS HIS OWN BRAND OF IRRESISTIBLE COUNTRY By Matt Hendrickson December Rain Hansen One night in November, the Kernal, a.k.a. Joe Garner, was teaching his fourteen-year-old niece some basic guitar chords over FaceTime. She was a quick learner, memorizing the correct finger positions. But Garner encouraged her to run her fingers up the strings and “do something weird.” That’s where you find your uniqueness, he told her. That’s where the good stuff comes from. “It’s scary when people think you’re weird,” he tells me later over a Zoom chat from his home in Jackson, Tennessee. “But, you know, who gives a shit, right?” Garner has been writing—and riding—his own version of weird for…

ASK G&G Steal Magnolias POCKET GARDEN PICKPOCKETS, HORSES OF A DIFFERENT COLOR, AND THE ORIGIN OF BOCEPHUS By Guy Martin ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER Q/A  We plant a street-side flank of the yard for show, but, come the crocuses and tulips, thieves descend. How do we deter them? Crazy, no? Most folks would find it abhorrent to stroll through a park, grubbing at the beauty. But somehow bounty in a (perceived) less observed circumstance causes people to unleash their inner bio-miscreant and have at you, hammer and tong. After bandits boosted a beloved azalea overnight—yes, the whole thing—a friend of mine buried bricks in a sunburst pattern around those left, attaching the bricks to the trunks with thirty-pound-test fishing line that he also buried, on the theory it’d cost thieves…

Deep Dive Walk the plank at the Fat Pelican A working-class holdout in Carolina Beach just south of Wilmington, the Fat Pelicanbar revolves around a sandy backyard decorated with beach flotsam. You enter through a narrow galley and choose your own beer by walking a gangplank into an old reefer truck, connected to the back end of the bar. Start with a German lager from Wilmington’s Edward Teach Brewery. If you’re hungry, bartender Bess Giles will sell you a pack of ToastChees, born upstate in Charlotte. —JTE…

MADE IN THE SOUTH Heir to the Thrown AN ARKANSAS POTTERY STUDIO RETURNS BRIGHT HISTORIC MOCHA WARE TO TABLES By CJ Lotz PHOTOGRAPHS BY HOUSTON COFIELD When Joseph Jostes drops a bit of liquid onto a clay cup and a seaweed shape fans out, blooming black across the light orange surface, he’s not only decorating a vessel, he’s also keeping alive an almost-extinct tradition of patterned pottery called Mocha ware. From their SJ Pottery studio and home, just off the main drag of little Salesville, Arkansas, Jostes and his wife, Susan Skinner, sell and mail out tea beakers striped in yellow and blue, and mugs bathed in a persimmon hue. “Looking around our dark log cabin house,” Jostes says, “I understand why everybody wanted this brightly colored stuff.” Mocha ware…

LOUISIANA FISH CAMP RUSTIC IDEALS MEET RAREFIED DESIGN AT A NEW ORLEANS FAMILY’S WATERSIDE GETAWAY By TOM FOSTER Photographs by ALISON GOOTEE FRED HEEBE HAS BEEN KNOWN TO KEEP A WINDOW OPEN ON his computer in New Orleans monitoring the weather and water conditions to the east. And if everything lines up right, he might just skip out of the office after a morning meeting, make the short drive over to his family’s waterfront retreat in St. Bernard Parish, get out on the boat by lunchtime to fish, and return to the city for dinner. “It really makes it where you can enjoy Sportsman’s Paradise,” he says. “It’s just right there.” Heebe and his wife, Jennifer, like to refer to the home as a “fishing camp,” but that’s a bit…

ADVENTURES Grand Seclusion A SHORT FLIGHT SOUTH, BELIZE’S CARIBBEAN FLATS JUST MIGHT HOOK YOU By T. Edward Nickens Turneffe Island Resort Aye yai yai,” William “Buddy” Johnson groans. “So shallow. So spooky in this water. They can hear you coming. Move slow, slow, slow.” We’re stalking bonefish on an aquamarine flat inside the coral reef ringing Belize’s Turneffe Atoll, the country’s largest atoll. The water is barely ankle-deep, and the bones’ sickle tails gleam in the sunlight, dorsal fins flip-flopping from side to side as they grub for shrimp and crabs. Johnson knows we have a challenge in these conditions. His father guided bonefish anglers for thirty years across the Belizean flats, and he’s been fishing with him since he was a little boy. Now thirty-six, he wears a diamond…

Social Chatter GARDENANDGUN.COM AND BEYOND WE ASKED... What was the name of your first dog? In our Talk of the South newsletter, readers told us about their first four-legged best friends. Sandy. I wanted to name her Worcestershire, which was my favorite word at the time, but thankfully, my parents intervened. Judy R. When a stray showed up at our house, starving, with a chopped tail and a cut ear, I had to name her something to help her self-esteem: Beauty. Sue D. Cohiba, or Cobi for short. My husband is Cuban and loves cigars (and yellow Labs). Cheryl W. My first dog was my six-year-old birthday present, and I named her Linda’s Silver Princess. Linda P. The rescue organization named him Marvelous, but we changed it to Champ.…

BOOKS Secret Ingredients A COMPELLING NEW HISTORY ENSHRINES FORGOTTEN TASTEMAKERS By Jonathan Miles Southern cooking, like midwifing and needlecraft, has generally been considered one of the home arts. We’ve tended to picture its originators and chief practitioners as women—Black, white, or Native—in rural kitchens, simmering and stirring what would become the Southern culinary canon: fried chicken, grits, field peas, cornbread, greens. And for the most part, this is true. But as the food and drink historian Robert F. Moss explores, in The Lost Southern Chefs, a parallel mode of cooking and eating also developed in the nineteenth century. In restaurants, saloons, hotels, and banquet halls, a variegated troupe of chefs—back then known as caterers—were fashioning another genus of Southern cuisine boasting a distinctive flavor profile: broiled shad, terrapin stew, green…

St. Paul Returns New music from a Birmingham favorite St. Paul & the Broken Bones THE ALIEN COAST Over the course of three albums, Birmingham, Alabama’s St. Paul & the Broken Bones, led by powerhouse singer Paul Janeway, have shed the blue-eyed soul tag, evolving with each record into something more ambitious and profound. On the band’s exceptional fourth album, The Alien Coast, the infectious, disco-tinged lead single, “The Last Dance,” sets the stage for a mega suite of songs that are the octet’s most musically adventurous to date. Think Al Green paired with the atmospheric grandeur of Pink Floyd and a dash of Outkast funk. It takes a few listens (a headphone session is a must), but the album gradually reveals its slow-burning genius. Bonus: These songs will kill…

DRINKS Home Rum AN EXCEPTIONAL NEW SOUTHERN BLEND CELEBRATES TASTES OF THE CARIBBEAN By Wayne Curtis Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry; glassware: Fieldshop (ggfieldshop.com) PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY AUTRY A few years ago, Hatton Smith II made a discovery: He wasn’t temperamentally suited to work for others. So at twenty-two he quit his job as a coffee trader in New York and bought a one-way ticket to Panama. He eventually set up a primitive operation in the mountains, buying and roasting local coffee by hand over a fire to sell to international students and others. (Coffee is in his blood; his family has owned Royal Cup Coffee in Birmingham since 1950.) Then he acquired a spirit still and figured out how to ferment crushed sugarcane and distill that into…

SHOPS Home Theater A WEST PALM BEACH DECOR HAVEN PUSHES THE BOUNDS OF IMAGINATION By Nila Do Simon Charles Peed (3) Inside a wonderland of an atelier on the outskirts of West Palm Beach, an eighteenth-century sofa has found new life amid the showstopping home decor vignettes that have become Casa Gusto’s calling card. Rumored to be connected to Jane Austen, the George III mahogany stunner sits among other antique gems, including drop-leaf tables from Sweden, a jeweler’s table from Spain, and a Louis XIV console, all of them unearthed by a family whose love of revamping found objects matches their ability to present them as only they can. Cris Briger and her sons, Charles Peed and Pablo Briger, have long filled their lives with goods both new and old,…

PALM BEACH PASTORAL A BUSY WELLINGTON FAMILY SLOWS TO A TROT IN FLORIDA HORSE COUNTRY By ELIZABETH HUTCHISON HICKLIN Photographs by BRIE WILLIAMS COMPETING IN HORSE SHOWS MEANS A NOMADIC LIFE—ONE split between New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Kentucky, and Florida, among other domestic and international locales—and one that often moves at a frenetic pace. Becky Gochman, who along with her two teenage daughters, Sophie and Mimi, vies in both the hunter and jumper classes on the amateur and junior circuits, likens the scene to something from a Wes Anderson film: “There are horses and water trucks, bicycles, Vespas, and golf carts all rushing by. There’s so much movement. It’s hurried and hectic—dynamic.” So when she and her husband, David, began looking for a home base, they knew they wanted an…

Belize’s Green Wave Three more new and newly refreshed retreats where adventure calls Belize Dive Haven Resort & Marina A gleaming ninety-room hotel on more than one hundred acres of private island sits on Turneffe Atoll north of the Turneffe Island Resort. Lush, plush, and serious about diving adventures, the resort hosts courses for beginning and advanced divers and leads excursions to a bucket list locale, the Great Blue Hole. Itz’ana Resort & Residences A reef-to-rain-forest luxury base camp on southern Belize’s Placencia Peninsula, Itz’ana highlights cuisine from local farmers and fishermen and is home to one of the region’s largest rum collections. Along with fishing and diving, adventure options include bird- and manatee-watching trips and national park hikes. Ray Caye Island Resort This refurbished private island enclave reopened in…

CONTRIBUTORS Michael Farris Smith WRITER Philippe Matsas No one can pinpoint exactly why so many great literary works spring from Oxford, Mississippi. “Faulkner couldn’t answer it, Larry Brown couldn’t answer it,” says Michael Farris Smith, himself an Oxford novelist. “The city just has that reputation, so artists migrate here, which naturally grows the community and the creative output.” For Smith, Larry Brown’s writing retreat in nearby Tula encompasses all of the region’s literary mojo turned up to eleven. “It’s almost like holy ground,” he says of the spot, which he describes further in “Discovering a Writer’s Place” (p. 114). “To be sitting in a place one of my heroes built for himself, a place I read about twenty years ago when I was first starting out trying to make it,…

INTERVIEW Triple Threat PATRICK WILSON ACTS, SINGS, AND DANCES HIS WAY FROM APPALACHIA TO HOLLYWOOD’S BIGGEST FRANCHISES By Silas House Matt Holyoak/Camera Press/Redux Matt Holyoak/Camera Press/Redux Patrick Wilson, one of the busiest forces in Hollywood, is also a proud native of the South who still uses a cast-iron skillet to make cornbread from scratch. This year he will star in two blockbusters: the Aquamansequel, reprising his role as King Orm; and the sci-fi epic Moonfall. He’ll also be working on his directorial debut, the fifth installment of his Insidious franchise. Wilson has an eclectic résumé—he dazzled in the TV adaptation of Angels in America and has headlined in series such as Fargo—but is perhaps best known for carrying the most successful horror series in box-office history; The Conjuring films have…

More Praise for Chefs Dynamite new cookbooks honor Southern flavors “Fun is the most important thing,” writes Mason Hereford in the introduction to Turkey and the Wolf (Ten Speed), named after his buzzy New Orleans sandwich shop. The chef ’s sense of play comes out in rollicking anecdotes, cheeky photos, and recipes for fried chicken salad and a cheesy collard melt. In Life of Fire (Clarkson Potter), the Nashville pitmaster Pat Martin reveals what he’s learned about barbecue over his decades of coaxing smoke, including savvy tips for grilling quail and seasoning a haul of green beans with Memphis dry rub. Charity Morgan, the wife of former Tennessee Titan Derrick Morgan, knew she was onto something when her husband’s teammates kept asking for the same plant-powered meals she made for…

ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC Souped Up SAVORY MUSHROOM PESTO ELEVATES THE FLAVOR IN BLACKBERRY MOUNTAIN CHEF JOEY EDWARDS’S WARMING POTATO SOUP By Kim Severson Chefs are who they are, which means they usually can’t resist fancying up even the simplest dish. The results can be delicious, but the recipes often don’t translate easily for the home cook. A welcome exception: the potato soup dreamed up by Joey Edwards, the executive p.m. chef of Three Sisters restaurant at Blackberry Mountain in Tennessee, a second resort from the family that started nearby Blackberry Farm. Like so many great recipes, it starts with a food memory. Edwards’s family moved from South Carolina to the Raleigh-Durham area and eventually to Willard, North Carolina, when he was a teenager. He has seven brothers and sisters,…

FORK in the ROAD Seafood Salute SEABIRD BRINGS A SOPHISTICATED TASTE OF NORTH CAROLINA’S SALTWATER BOUNTY—AND BIVALVES FOR BREAKFAST—TO DOWNTOWN WILMINGTON BY JOHN T. EDGE PHOTOGRAPHS BY MALLORY CASH Illustration by Michael Spitz Do oysters on the half shell taste even better at nine in the morning? In a restaurant that also does right by olive oil muffins with passion fruit curd, should you go marine or sweet? Eat breakfast at the front bar at Seabird, which opened last spring in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, and these questions float through your head. Dinner promises much, including a riff on cioppino, thick with clams and grouper and scallops and fennel, with a slab of rouille-smeared sourdough planted in the bowl like a flag. But let’s stick with breakfast for a moment,…

SOUTHERN STYLE Indoor Oasis HOUSEPLANTS READY FOR DISPLAY, DELIVERED RIGHT TO YOUR HOME By Haskell Harris PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATE SEARS Set design by Linden Elstran/Art Department STAG PARTY “I don’t want to offer something you can get everywhere,” says Ayelet Faerman of the cypress-mounted staghorn ferns and Curly Slim air plants she ships nationwide for Verdant Lyfe, the Coral Springs, Florida, company she founded with her mother, Ofra Gaito, during the pandemic. Instead, she relies on small farmers growing native species and hybrids that thrive in their tropical locale. Faerman suggests watering the plants once a week with spring water and placing them in a spot that mimics the dappled sunlight they receive in nature ($59–$64; verdant lyfe.com ). STATEMENT PIECES White Flower Farm has long been a go-to for bulbs…

BAHAMAS HIDEAWAY TWO MIAMI ARCHITECTS BRING THEIR DREAMS TO LIFE WITH A SUBLIME BUNGALOW ON ELEUTHERA By CAROLINE SANDERS Photographs by WILLIAM ABRANOWICZ WHEN THE SUN RISES ON ELEUTHERA, A HUNDRED-MILE SWEEP of rock and sand in the Bahamian archipelago, a primeval world awakens: Bahama mockingbirds warble from somewhere in the pines, pink rain lilies stretch open their petals, and in their 650-square-foot hut tucked into the sea grapes and silver buttonwood, Melissa and Jacob Brillhart and their five-year-old daughter, Simms, greet the day. At first glance, the “Brillhut,” as friends have dubbed the house, is almost indistinguishable from the thicket of flora around it. But the chance of anyone getting close enough for a glimpse in the first place is slim. Styling by Amy Chin “We’re off the beaten…

SMOKE, TIME,and the (NEARLY) LOST ART of SACK SAUSAGE A TRIO of DEVOTEES HIT the ROAD in SEARCH of a LEGENDARY TASTE of the PAST THAT’S HANGING by a THREAD By JOHN T. EDGE Photographs by PETER FRANK EDWARDS THEY USED TO CALL IT CARNY, ” Troy Smiley says, standing at the door of his smokehouse. “That whang you get after a sack of sausage hangs.” He wears jeans and a flannel jacket. His eyes glint with mischief. “We used to try to get rid of that whang,” Troy tells us, looking up from the dirt floor. “Now they want it.” We are they: pilgrims who have traveled here in search of something we fear might go lost. March Egerton, a son of the late Southern thinker and writer John Egerton,…

THE LARRY BROWN READER Big Bad Love This is not his first story collection, but it is the collection that introduced me to Larry Brown. I wandered into Square Books in Oxford one night, years and years ago, and picked up Big Bad Love from a table marked Mississippi Writers. I devoured these stories the same night, and I realized what a Mississippi writer, working in the here and now, could do. Father and Son There is a foreboding anger, stirring beneath the surface, that is set to explode on every page of Father and Son. This novel is like a ticking time bomb, and as the story goes on, there is no reason to feel sympathy for the main character, Glen, but I find myself having sympathy for him.…

OUR KIND OF PLACE Outer Banks Refuge FINDING SOLITUDE AND SOLACE ON NORTH CAROLINA’S PEA ISLAND By Caleb Johnson Peter Stout We entered Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge without quite realizing it. Perhaps we’d missed a sign posted alongside North Carolina Highway 12, the lone two-lane linking the Outer Banks from top to bottom. Grass-covered dunes rose to the left until they blocked the Atlantic Ocean from sight, and to the right salt marsh stretched toward the muddy edge of the vast Pamlico Sound. Across the road from a visitor center, we stopped at a beach that was empty except for shorebirds dodging ragged waves crashing onto the sand. Established in 1938 on land formerly owned by private waterfowl hunt clubs, the refuge covers 5,000 acres of maritime shrub and…