Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2023 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @davedibenedetto To my mind, there’s not a more beautiful native fish, or one that lives in more beautiful surroundings, than the brook trout (a.k.a. speck) of the Appalachian Mountains. And while I’ve been fortunate enough to land all manner of species—from sunnies to sailfish—until last July, I’d never held a Southern brook trout in my hands. The plan, spearheaded by my friend Travis Folk, a wildlife biologist and mapmaker, was pretty simple. Each evening over a bourbon or two at our weekend base of Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, we studied topographic maps of the Nantahala National Forest. At dawn we’d strike out on a hiking trail with wading gear stuffed in our backpacks for a good thirty minutes before bushwhacking to a…

GARDENANDGUN.COM .01 COLUMNS Explore the Wild South Twice each month, G&G contributing editor T. Edward Nickens shares his insights on Southern sporting pursuits in his digital column, The Wild South. Nickens has spent decades in the field, and whether it’s a dispatch from the turkey woods or the duck blind, the best new gear, or a favorite game recipe, his column will help you make the most of the great Southern outdoors. And if you’ve got a sporting dad in your life, make sure to check out his Father’s Day gift guide. Including: FIELD REPORTS TIPS FOR TROUT AND TARPON READ MORE AT: gardenandgun.com/wildsouth .02 NEWSLETTERS Get G&G’s New Travel Newsletter It’s summertime, and the beach is calling. Or is it the lake? Or maybe it’s that distillery…

On a sultry November day in the Dominican Republic in 2019, Tommy Prine was backstage at All the Best Fest, a five-day music gathering curated by his father, the legendary country-folk singer John Prine, with help from his mother, Fiona Whelan-Prine. The event featured Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, and Nathaniel Rateliff, among others, but one artist had abruptly pulled out of a noon opening slot, and the Prine team was trying to figure out a replacement. They didn’t want to ask one of the artists on-site to play an extra set, but it was too late to fly someone else in. Then Tommy’s wife, Savannah, piped up. “Tommy will do it,” she said. Heads turned. “Do you have original songs?” someone asked. “Yeah, I’ve got a lot of them,” Tommy…

Sydni Gause begins her mornings in her organic garden, pinching flowers to encourage bushiness, watering, fertilizing, and fighting off pests. Then the Panama City, Florida, artist collects mature specimens, including scabiosa and hibiscus, and heads inside to the studio with her mediums. There, strips of creamy raw silk already tinged with blossoms of mossy greens, smoky blues, and burnt oranges hang about drying. Stepping toward the worktable, Gause begins dyeing another, submerging a square of silk in a solution of aluminum sulfate and then gently wringing it out. She lays the fabric down and arranges atop half of it purple-tinged cosmos, tiny orange tango, violet hibiscus, and rusty smoke-bush leaves, the pigments of which will shift during processing—the solution, known as a mordant, can “sadden” the color, Gause says, deepening…

Chef Malyna Si loves even the tiniest detail. When she isn’t running Capa, the Michelin-starred Spanish-influenced steak house at the Four Seasons Resort in Orlando, Florida, she puts her degree in sculpture from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco to use creating immaculate miniature food and tablescapes that she posts on Instagram. “It’s so fun and takes so much patience,” she says. Paying attention to each step elevates whatever she creates, whether a sculpture or even the simplest dish. “I think about everything on every plate,” she says. “Does it all make sense and make something greater than the parts?” Take pan con tomate (or pa amb tomàquet in Catalan), a Spanish staple that’s essentially nothing more than tomatoes rubbed with a little garlic over toasted bread and…

THIS LAND Each week I drive the back roads between my home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, where I currently teach, byways I have known for as long as I’ve been alive. The plots of trees along them served as landmarks for eight-year-old me, strapped into the back of my parents’ gray Mitsubishi Galant with my little brother, Nicholas, headed for my father’s family farm in Silverstreet. We would skirt the edges of Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests. When we passed the big two-story white house with columns, it meant we’d reached Belfast Wildlife Management Area, about halfway to Grandma’s house. The biggest trees I’d ever seen towered along the Saluda River where we would make a left to reach the Graham land. Much of that journey…

ASK SOUTHERN MOTORCYCLISTS ABOUT THEIR favorite rides, and a few storied names are sure to cross their lips: the Natchez Trace Parkway, the Cherohala Skyway, the Tail of the Dragon, and the Blue Ridge Parkway, among others. Today, however, I’d like to take you on one of my personal favorites—a lesser-known route that’s worthy of more attention, perhaps even a place in the canon of epic Southern rides: the Coastal Highway, US 17, as it follows the Atlantic Seaboard. It’s a route my late father handed down to me based on his extensive two-wheeled travels, back when I’d ride my ’89 Harley-Davidson from North Carolina down to the Georgia coast to visit my parents. It’s the route I still enjoy whenever possible, as it offers so much more splendor, history,…

LUCINDA WILLIAMS DOESN’T REMEMBER A LOT ABOUT THAT AFTERNOON. It was November 17, 2020, and the acclaimed singer-songwriter and her husband of eleven years, Tom Overby, had been quarantined in their East Nashville bungalow since March. Williams was using her newfound downtime to work on her memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, and record a series of performances called Lu’s Jukebox that would become tribute albums. She also had a number of songs left over from her most recent album, Good Souls Better Angels, that she wanted to develop. In just a week, she’d be nominated for her sixteenth and seventeenth Grammy Awards. But when she tried to take a shower, Williams began to feel… exhausted. Her head swam; her legs wobbled. All she could think about…

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOULSHOPS A beer bar can take many forms. It can be a center of craft where tourists dip a toe in the local scene, a way station where regulars encounter beers from across the country, or a port where tipplers welcome rare imports. It can be a gastropub with an impeccably curated tap list that pairs with finger foods, a bottle shop that offers the best on draft and in cans, or an ale-obsessed emporium lined with hundreds of handles. Southern beer bars represent a haven for brew fanatics to find one another, and for small operations to get their suds in front of the beer curious. For years, strict brewing and distribution laws have meant the region’s beer culture struggled to find a…

David McClister PHOTOGRAPHER David McClister has built a career photographing the who’s who of the music industry, including Dolly Parton, Mavis Staples, Willie Nelson, and Taylor Swift. “I think I’m drawn to this subject because of my love of music and my utter lack of musical ability,” says McClister, whose images have appeared in Rolling Stone and Billboard. “I can’t sing or play an instrument, but I’m a huge record collector.” During his photo shoot with Lucinda Williams (p. 144) at a farm outside Nashville, the two discovered their shared affection for the blues and listened to songs by Memphis Minnie and Sister Ola Mae Terrell. “I’m drawn to this subject because of my love of music and my lack of musical ability”—David McClister on photographing musicians such as Lucinda…

Deborah Roberts knows firsthand that teachers canbe beacons of light. The Emmy-winning ABC News correspondent grew up the seventh of nine children at the beginning of school integration in Perry, Georgia. In the sixth grade, she met her favorite English teacher, Dorothy Hardy. One day, as Hardy was returning class essays, she told Roberts that she was smart and had potential to go far in life. From then on, Roberts not only wanted to do well in school, she wanted to be exceptional. Roberts carried this attitude with her, finding “teachers” at news stations throughout her career. And in her new book, Lessons Learned and Cherished: The Teacher Who Changed My Life, Roberts asks Kenneth Cole, Oprah Winfrey, Misty Copeland, Rosie Perez, and dozens more notables about the educators who…

Smoked Peach Tea Mezcal Sour Yield: 1 cocktail INGREDIENTS 1½ oz. mezcal ¾ oz. lemon juice ¾ oz. smoked peach tea simple syrup* 1 egg white 1 peach slice, dried or fresh, for garnish PREPARATION Place first 4 ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice and shake for 20 seconds to emulsify the egg white. Add ice, then shake another 20 seconds to chill and dilute. Strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a slice of dried or fresh peach. *Pour 1 cup boiling water over 2 tbsp. loose leaf smoked peach tea (if not available, substitute 1 tea bag of Lapsang souchong). Steep 5 minutes and strain. Stir in 1 cup of sugar until dissolved.…

The smell of nixtamalized corn from the next-door tortilleria swirls the parking lot at Gorditas Paty in the southwestern suburbs of Little Rock. Corrugated tin wainscoting lines the walls of this bright and beautiful restaurant, the second of four locations owner Patricia Alonso wants to open in Arkansas. Sombreros, piñatas, and a rainbow of banners made from perforated tissue paper hang above a pastry case stocked with the domed Mexican sweet breads called conchas. Near the open kitchen, a roofing crew in neon hoodies gathers at a serape-draped table beneath a tapestry portrait of Frida Kahlo. I sip coffee from a terra-cotta mug as Alonso, who opened her first Gorditas Paty in Little Rock in 2016, slips into a booth opposite me. Using a translation app, we text-to-talk about Aguascalientes,…

Eden Bishop remembers playing in her great-grandmother Lida’s Smoky Mountains garden as a child. Lida’s 1911 home, called Rostrevor, stood as a crown jewel of Knoxville, Tennessee, with a sunken Italian garden, terraced lawn, and columned patio lined with roses, irises, and purple clematis. “My great-grandmother had a woodland wildflower garden, too,” Eden recalls. “Even though the paths hadn’t been maintained, as a kid, I could still find them, and it was magical.” Although the original house was demolished in 1969, and a chunk of the woods and gardens was bulldozed in the 1980s to make way for a country club’s tennis courts, the family held on to much of the twelve-acre property. Decades later, after returning home to Tennessee from years living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a divorce,…

CATALOOCHEE RANCH, WHERE OUR ADVENTURE BE- gins, is the kind of magical mountainous resort you’ve heard about but may never have truly believed existed, a mythic horse paradise with amazing food, unbelievable views, and romantic cabins. It’s right above Maggie Valley, North Carolina, and just below the clouds. Laura and I were here to ride horses. Laura’s my wife, and, like me, new to the horse-riding game. This would be our first real trip on the back of a horse or, now that I think about it, on the back of any animal. We like to think of ourselves as adventurers but adventurers in the suburban sense of the word, meaning we’ll try our hand at anything if there’s wireless, a shower, bourbon, and a soft but firm mattress nearby.…

“I was not sure if I was reading true crime or if somehow I had tapped into Robert Earl Keen’s latest ballad” ROCK ON I am a mailman, and when I was delivering issues of Garden & Gun to people’s houses, I was very happy to see Jason Isbell on the cover (April/May 2023). I just watched his new documentary and have never seen a documentary that was so real. He puts it all on the table, the good and the bad. It’s a must-watch. I’m glad to see his continued success. Dustin McFarland Owensboro, Kentucky I loved seeing Jason Isbell on the cover. It was in Garden & Gun, years ago, that I first heard of him, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I hope he comes back…

If the history of Central Florida were charted out on a graph,” writes Anne Hull, “it would start with primordial sludge and then curve toward the Paleo Indians, the Calusa Indians, the Tocobaga Indians, Ponce de Léon, runaway slaves, snuff-dipping white settlers, the U.S. Army, Osceola, the great Seminole warrior, malaria, cattle, citrus, and a dull heat that left it undesirable for much besides oranges until the early 1960s, when Walt Disney took a plane ride over the vast emptiness, looked down, and said, ‘There.’” If Hull’s history were likewise charted, it would start in Central Florida’s orange groves (“one botanical grid after another, dark green regiments of trees marching up and down the middle of the state”) and then wobble across several Florida towns before making a leap to…

Cameron Weiss makes watches in what used to be a printshop, a family business that produced labels for vinyl records by the most famous bands on earth. Before its building became Weiss Watch Company, Hamlett Printing Service created the lettering design on singles and albums, including the Beatles’ first American release, “Please Please Me,” spelling, of all words, Beatles incorrectly (with an extra t). Weiss, who is thirty-five, has owned the space for three years, since moving from Los Angeles, and he’s kept everything mostly as is. He left the Hamlett sign in chipped white letters on the outside brick. He asked the cleaning crew to abstain from touching the fossilized ink on the concrete floor. And eventually he’ll pony up for a first pressing of that misspelled single on…

BIRDBATH Welcome warblers and wrens to cool off in this stately cast-stone bath from the Williamsburg collection by Campania, seen here with a vintage bird statue—every piece nods to Virginia antiques and the timeless lines of eighteenth-century gardens ($400; garden-fountains.com). WALL PLANTER Installing the three sizes of these pots by Campo de Fiori en masse on a wall and filling them with plants that pop creates a visual treat, and the aged mossy patina adds instant history. Plus their flat backs—which come with a hole for a masonry screw, nail, or hook—keep them from wobbling when watered ($24–$44; campodefiori.com). WAGON Woven resin fibers make this utterly charming Belgianmade garden cart from Weston Table weatherproof, while also echoing willow garden baskets of yore. And it’s not dainty: It can support heavy…

IF YOU’RE THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO’D ENJOY hiking several miles into an overlush Caribbean rain forest, tramping up and down enough mountains and ridges to make your route resemble a seismograph reading, then wandering an ashy, hissing ruinscape where you ford streams of boiling water (carefully, carefully, rock by rock) until at last you come to a bubbling blue-gray cauldron of a lake, about two hundred feet across, that seethes and swirls and steams like something out of a 1950s sci-fi B movie…well, better get a move on. That’s because construction of what’s being billed as the world’s longest cable car system has begun on the tiny, underknown, and ravishingly beautiful island of Dominica, in the Lesser Antilles, to ferry visitors to what for decades has been a hard-won…

WHEN I TURNED THIRTY-FIVE AND MY KNEES began cracking like glow sticks every time I climbed the stairs, I decided it was time to give my joints a break from running and take up cycling. Then I managed to befriend Jennah, a former elite cyclist in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, and persuaded her to let me tag along on rides. I do not recommend this approach unless you are prepared for routine humiliation. A few months ago, as I was huffing through yet another hill, I asked Jennah, “Does this ever get easier?” She looked at me a moment, breathing effortlessly, and replied, “It never gets easier, you just get faster.” After exclusively riding Western North Carolina’s steep ridges, I was ready for something a little more forgiving.…

“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson It is not yet 11:00 a.m., less than an hour into our float, and Rose (not her real name) is hauling in the trout. A teenager with long brunette hair and a happy, resolute face, she stands in the bow of the drift boat wearing big pink sunglasses and casting a double-nymph/indicator rig with her 6-weight fly rod. Our ace young guide George Zumberge gives advice on mending and setting the hook, which she follows precisely, with laser focus on her indicator, while at the same time answering my questions. She is sixteen and lives in…

Charlie Vergos didn’t invent barbecue ribs when he opened Rendezvous in downtown Memphis in 1948, but he did make them iconic. “You can smell them barbecuing from the Peabody hotel,” says Robert Stewart Jr., who for the last four decades has worked at times as a waiter, cook, bartender, and jack of all trades at the cozy red-checkered-tablecloth establishment. “The customers are my friends. I know their names and their faces, and I’ve watched their kids grow up to come in and teach their kids how to eat ribs.” Although it may seem counterintuitive since Rendezvous’s ribs are famously dry rubbed, a baste keeps the rack moist and creates a nice char as the meat slow-cooks on the grill for about an hour and a half. To make a baste…