Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2023 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER ■ Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @davedibenedetto If my calendar holds, when this issue lands in your mailbox, I’ll have just returned from one of my favorite hunts of the year, a dove shoot in Smithfield, North Carolina, with G&G contributing editor T. Edward Nickens. Smithfield is home to Garrett Wildflower Seed Farm, where, among other things, its owner, Don Lee, plants one of the finest dove fields in the state. A lucky group of family and friends gets invited to hunt it a few times throughout the season. But in my case, that’s only half of it. I always make sure to leave Charleston, South Carolina, in time to arrive for lunch, which is whipped up by Don’s wife, Laura, and sister, Ann Ennis. On the…

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTUREMUSIC Before she takes the stage, Ashley McBryde likes to get a feel for the room. Sometimes she’ll sit in the seats if it’s a theater; if she’s playing a festival, she’ll grab her band and sit on the grass. In the silence, she has learned to listen to what the venue might say to her. Maybe that night calls for a deep cut from one of her albums. Or perhaps it’s an Allman Brothers Band or Eagles cover. McBryde has played all kinds of venues. Before moving to Nashville in 2005, she spent years honing her live shows at dives and biker joints in her native Arkansas. Locals say Nashville is a ten-year town, meaning it can take a decade before an artist finds success.…

Last March, Manda Michaelis saw a bird dog dream come true in the piney woods of Thomasville, Georgia. At the forty-third annual field trial of the Georgia-Florida Shooting Dog Handlers Club—a group of about thirty-five prominent Black dog trainers, many descended from a long line of handlers and trainers guiding hunters through the Red Hills’ famed quail properties—Michaelis competed as the club’s first female member. “I’m just really proud that I came into this community and can do what it takes,” she says. “I wanted to show them that I can work as hard as everyone else and that my dog is as good as everyone else’s, and now I can open the door for others.” The bird-dog bug bit Michaelis hard after she got her German shorthaired pointer Benny…

If Southern food formed a band, succotash would be the bass player. Like a subtle but essential backbeat, the summer dish of corn, beans, squash, and sometimes tomatoes, seasoned with bacon, never seeks attention but is so foundational, the Southern culinary canon would pale without it. A few things about succotash. The dish is not native to the South. For centuries, cooks from the Narragansett Indian tribe in what is now Rhode Island simmered corn with seasonal ingredients and called it “msickquatash.” Southern cooks have happily adopted the recipe, and there are as many versions as there are grandmothers. Case in point: the succotash chef Lawrence Weeks developed for North of Bourbon, which opened in Louisville’s Germantown neighborhood in 2021. Weeks grew up in Kentucky, and after culinary school and…

SNACK BOARD Create the ultimate, party-sized charcuterie spread on an almost-three-foot-long reclaimed wood etúHOME serving board ($255; etuhome.com). MEASURING CUP This extra-large cherry vessel by Polder’s Old World Market will hold two cups of baking ingredients—and a bucket of charm ($240; poldersold worldmarket.com). KITCHEN TOOLS Sustainably harvested Guatemalan ziricote transforms into Jayson Home’s knives, spoons, ice cream scoop, and more ($18–$60; jaysonhome.com). MORTARS AND PESTLES Muddle and mash to your heart’s content with Blue Pheasant’s acacia mortars and pestles ($118 for set of two; shopblue pheasant.com). JUICER Be Home’s handcrafted olive-wood press from Fieldshop makes it easy to add a hint of citrus to a cocktail or pasta ($26; ggfieldshop.com). TEAPOT The ritual of brewing a morning (or afternoon, or evening) cuppa shines bright with a very British quick-boil teapot…

Destinations ASHFORD CASTLE, IRELAND SILVER HILTON STEELHEAD LODGE, BRITISH COLUMBIA LOYTON LODGE, ENGLAND PRONAY CASTLE, HUNGARY VENTOSILLA PALACE, SPAIN MAGIC WATERS, CHILE LOS OMBUES LODGE, ARGENTINA EG-UR RIVER TAIMEN CAMPS, MONGOLIA ARHVAMMUR LODGE, ICELAND CEDAR LODGE, NEW ZEALAND GRAND SLAM LODGE, MEXICO THE DELPHI CLUB, BAHAMAS BY FAR THE MOST interesting international trips I’ve made in my life—from the windswept wilds of Labrador, to the vast Russian tundra, to the endless aquamarine flats of the Bahamas, to the verdant Chilean rainforest—have occurred because of my obsession with fly angling. Fly fishing (and bird hunting, for that matter) does not happen in ugly places, as they say. So while, yes, I have made some overseas trips without my fly rod and visited many of the world’s great, vibrant cities and lingered…

Lynsey Weatherspoon PHOTOGRAPHER Although Lynsey Weatherspoon moved to Atlanta from her hometown of Birmingham in 2014, she knew little about the South River until meeting up with Jacqueline Echols, one of Garden & Gun’s Champions of Conservation, who has dedicated her career to cleaning up the river (p. 115). “It made me more aware of how we should treat the water spaces within the city, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” says Weatherspoon, whose photos have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. “Both Birmingham and Atlanta are so critical to civil and human rights, and photography has helped me process what it means to preserve unknown moments that can help influence change in our world.” “Photography has helped me process what it means to preserve unknown…

■ For more information, go to ducks.org/pappy If you didn’t know, you might look at the thin ashy-black line running through the center of the duck call as an imperfection, or a curious blemish in the wood. But once you learned the backstory, you might look to your bank account to see just how much you could afford to pay for one of the most intriguing duck calls ever to hit the waterfowling world. This fall, Louisville woodworker Ed James and Mississippi custom call maker Josh Raggio are collaborating on a boutique line of duck calls made from charred whiskey barrel staves out of the famed Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, home of the cult-favorite Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. James, son-in-law of Julian Van Winkle III, and Raggio, one of…

Just off Piccadilly, four blocks from the Ritz, London cabs sat stuck in a sudden standstill. Moments before, the Rountree Tryon Galleries had hung a new work by the thirty-six-year-old artist Anna Clare Lees-Buckley in the window, and passersby were choking up St. James’s Street, taking in the striking sight-size portrait in oils of a gray partridge in flight: the orange head, the rust-red tail, the split black circle of feathers on its silver breast, like a glinting oculus, against a stark white sky. British culture has long celebrated the partridge, since even before mentions in Shakespeare’s plays and Henry VIII’s conservation decrees to protect it in the 1530s. But this painting doesn’t wallow in the romance of the foggy fields and moors, nor showcase the bird’s iconic status as…

For years around our house,” John Grisham says, “we would measure time by BF and AF—before The Firm and after The Firm.” In BF times, Grisham, then a young Mississippi lawyer, would kiss his wife, Renee, goodbye, unlock his office at 5:00 a.m., and write before work. His first novel, A Time to Kill, landed softly, but his second, 1991’s The Firm, became an instant bestseller and a major film starring Tom Cruise. After The Firm times: “I start every year on January 1 writing the next legal thriller, with a self-imposed six-month deadline,” he says. “Around April 1, my publisher asks for the estimated word count because they have to order paper.” It has taken plenty of pulp to print the more than three hundred million volumes Grisham has…

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORE HOMEPLACE In the 1950s, at her grandparents’ cabin tucked along the shore of Alabama’s Lake Martin, Hillery Head’s grandfather baked biscuits each morning while her father boated and water-skied. As a child, Head splashed in the same coves and lazed on the same dock, and later relished the same family tradition of a day’s-end cocktail cruise. In 1995, her parents built a house next door, where her three children learned to swim and tube, and gobbled up the golden biscuits still made from her grandfather’s recipe. After her husband’s death in 2018, Head decided it was her turn to build on a pine-punctuated piece of her family’s lakeside land, prompted by a long-held desire for a retreat of her own on…

You probably know homeowners who’ve come across a small but pleasant surprise they had no idea awaited them when they bought their property: tulips popping up where a previous owner planted bulbs, maybe, or the overgrown traces of a footpath through the woods. But there are surprises, and then there are surprises. “We didn’t even know the waterfall was there when we bought it,” says Mary Palmer Dargan, of the ferny Rivendell of woods and streams that surround the homestead she and her husband, Hugh, gradually jigsaw-puzzled together in Cashiers, North Carolina. “We didn’t know we owned it.” These days, it’s hard to miss what’s now the star attraction of this tract of steep and secluded valley, a calming, two-plus-acre oasis of temperate Southern Appalachian rainforest with a thousand feet…

In the Alabama parking lot that changed his life forever, the author Sonny Brewer turned toward me in his driver’s seat, called his dog, Bobby, into his lap, and told me the serendipitous tale of how his first novel came to be. We were sitting in Fairhope, the little city perched on Mobile Bay along the Gulf of Mexico where people come to eat, drink, and unwind. It’s also a place where pretty much everyone has a story to tell. Forty years ago, Sonny was “a carpenter with a creative writing degree,” building a carport for William E. Butterworth III, a best-selling author of military novels under the pen name W. E. B. Griffin. One day, Sonny’s saw blade buzzed through a board and grazed his pants. He didn’t bleed,…

“At a ball in Scotland in 1994, I asked all the handsome gents in kilts, ‘Do you know how to shag?’” DANCING QUEENS I grew up in North Myrtle Beach dancing the shag (“Save the Last Shag,” August/ September 2023). I met all the famous bands back then and even partied with the Tams. Wow, those were the days. I still listen to shag music every day on Riptide Radio and shag in my kitchen. Rebecca Ames Palm Springs, California This South Carolinian was a smash hit at a ball in Scotland in 1994. I asked all the handsome gents in kilts, “Do you know how to shag? It’s really easy—I’ll show you!” Each guy took a spin on the dance floor, and then they went and told all their…

What am I going to wear to this wedding?” It was 2017, and sisters Niki and Ritika Shamdasani were asking themselves just that—they lacked traditional formal attire for an upcoming Indian marriage ceremony. The duo, who grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, spent days video-calling their grandmother in India to hunt down authentic apparel, and even shopped on eBay. Finally, the two decided to create their own outfits. “In Indian culture,” Niki explains, “there’s a culture of making clothes.” They loved the results so much, they continued to design; admirers began asking about the pieces, and suddenly their lark “started taking on a life of its own.” The Shamdasanis dubbed their new company Sani, and today, they have won over those with South Asian roots and others (including Nordstrom) by…

BOOKS When thinking about their ancestors,” ponders the narrator of Jim Davidson’s 2000 novel, Mine Work, “everybody hopes, if not assumes, that a hero lurks back in there someplace.” Grace Elizabeth Hale didn’t need to hope or assume; she knew. Her grandfather Oury Berry had served as sheriff of rural Jefferson Davis County in the Piney Woods of Mississippi. One summer evening in 1947, family legend went, he fended off a mob gathered to lynch a Black prisoner accused of raping a white woman. “I’ve known most of you all my life, and I sure am going to hate to have to shoot you,” he upbraided them, like a proto–Atticus Finch, “but no one is taking a man out of my jail.” That the suspect died the next day, shot…

Sustainability seems a worthy goal. Who wouldn’t want to consume in such a way as to leave the faintest footprint possible? Yet the concept still has the whiff of hair shirt and gruel about it, especially when it comes to food and drink. If it’s good for the earth, cynics ask, can it taste any good? And what do producers actually mean by sustainable? Distillers, of course, have been among those chasing that grail—after all, distilling drains a lot of resources and results in a lot of waste. Copal Tree Distillery, in the rainforest of southern Belize, seems to have it figured out. Designed from the ground up to be as eco-friendly as possible, the distillery released its first Copalli Rum in 2018. It invites those aforementioned cynics to visit,…

In line at the counter to order a high-crowned pepperoni pizza, fired in a hardwood-stoked oven imported from Italy, I hear a man with tousled hair and muddy jeans say to a woman in a dress and pigtails, “I’m sorry I was late, but I ran over my cell phone with my truck.” Seated at a table in the corner, opposite Claes Oldenburg–inspired wall sculptures of a pizza pie and a bagel, I watch a server place a calzone before a woman in a magnolia-green smock. She takes one look at the giant crescent of crackly brown-black dough and laughs so loud that I burst out laughing too. A good restaurant gives its diners the opportunity to eavesdrop as well as eat. By that measure and several others, Leña Pizza…

If you squinted, you’d have thought the tiny dog edging his way along the shore of Lake Erie covered in crumbles of sand cherry and hop hornbeam leaves with switchgrass entangling his paws was a baby wolf. The beaches there are dotted with sea glass and slate, slick skipping stones and moss-colored murk, and this wily Chihuahua mix, covered in green, limped along for what must have been days until a kind onlooker called the Northern Chautauqua Canine Rescue to scoop him up. After a good warm bath, the volunteers quickly learned this little ten-pounder must have been somebody’s dog because he was house-trained and never snapped at anyone. But they also learned he must have been hit—and hit often—because his hips seemed to go one way while his front…

Learn more: WATCH VIDEOS OF THE CHAMPIONS IN ACTION AT GARDENANDGUN.COM/CHAMPIONSOFCONSERVATION Champion of: CLEAN WATER WATER WARRIOR Long before Atlanta’s South River became a political flash point, Jacqueline Echols began fighting to conserve the waterway Name: JACQUELINE ECHOLS Location: ATLANTA, GA Expertise: ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM Advocating Since: 1997 After thirteen years as president of Atlanta’s South River Watershed Alliance, Jacqueline Echols is used to dirty work: monitoring E. coli levels, hauling tires from the sandy river bottom, clashing with polluters in court. Still, she marvels at the mess that still surrounds the little waterway she pledged to protect. “It’s a quarter of an inch on a map, if that,” Echols says of the South River, a tree-lined ribbon flowing sixty miles from the city’s south side to Middle Georgia’s Jackson Lake.…