Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2025 i Garden & Gun

→ A GOOD MAGAZINE should always be evolving, keeping pace with the culture and current conversation. And a good magazine’s design should do the same. Which is why you may notice a few changes in the issue you’re holding. For starters, we have a fresh logo (designed with one of the top studios in the country, Pentagram) that takes its cues from our old version but gives it a modern and bold update. Illustrations throughout have gotten a refresh too, and the pages overall even better showcase G&G’s stunning photography. In addition, new fonts should make the reading experience easier and more immersive. If we’ve done our job properly, though, the magazine should still feel familiar but also sharper, like adding a fresh coat of paint to your favorite room…

Your Guide to Southern Culture “WE’RE TRYING TO HELP THE KIDS BECOME THE WORLD’S GREATEST MUSICIANS, MUSIC AGENTS, RECORD LABEL CEOS, AND PRODUCERS” YOU CAN CALL HIM Trombone, Shorty, or even Bone. Troy Andrews answers to nearly as many nicknames as the number of musical genres he’s fluent in. And as he’s become a beacon for present-day New Orleans music, bringing the funk of his hometown all over the world, he’s collaborated with an A-list to make you swoon: Elvis Costello, U2, and Eric Church, to name a few. Not to mention the glorious version of “America the Beautiful” he performed with the singer Lauren Daigle at this year’s Super Bowl. And while Andrews relishes the highlight-reel opportunities, a cause closer to home brings him just as much joy. ¶…

The Best of Southern Homes, Gardens, Style, and More ALEX AND KATHERINE SLATER know a thing or two about good shelter. In 2016, Alex, along with two friends, created the Shibumi Shade, the fluttering aqua-and-blue canopy now ubiquitous on Southern beaches. But a few years earlier, the couple spotted what would become their own stylish sanctuary, an Italianate-influenced Victorian farmhouse in Raleigh’s Historic Oakwood neighborhood. “We walked by and I told Alex, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my dream house,’” Katherine says. “It was so striking.” Just as Shibumis have a graceful simplicity about them, this house, with its sassy red door and red terne-metal roof, conveys a stately nonchalance. Sporting gingerbread details courtesy of decorative sawnwork unique to North Carolina and big arched windows, the structure seems absolutely comfortable in its…

OF THE MANY THINGS the singer-songwriter Jim Croce left to his two-year-old son after he died in a plane crash in 1973 at age thirty, a collection of a thousand or so vinyl records loomed large. For young A. J. Croce, listening to these old hits—by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles, and the like—steered the trajectory of his life, instilling in him a love of music, inspiring his career, and connecting him to his hitmaking dad forever. “My father’s record collection was a huge influence on me,” says Croce, a self-taught piano virtuoso and a Billboard-charting singer-songwriter himself, who has collaborated with such luminaries as Willie Nelson, B.B. King, and John Oates. “It was so deep—old blues, jazz, rock and roll, soul, country, folk. Just all over the map.”…

THE RISE FROM sea level to four thousand feet happens fast. The cherry-red Kia Soul I’m maneuvering toward Cerro de Punta, the highest mountain in Puerto Rico, can barely keep up. Traffic has thinned since my friend Lennel and I left Ponce, a city on the southern shore. Soon we’re the only car on the steepening road. Funny thing about Google Maps: The app doesn’t depict elevation changes well. I follow the little blue squiggly line through a sea of gray, anticipating an afternoon of exploration and adventure in Bosque Estatal de Toro Negro, one of the island’s cloud forests, an ecosystem increasingly endangered by climate change. I’m armed with all the flora and fauna guides a local bookstore had on hand, and I’ve stationed my binoculars just under my…

THE GUY WITH the hardest job in Bentonville is the one who makes these maps,” says the veteran mountain biker, coach, and guide Sam Pearson with a laugh, as he wheels to a stop in front of a trailhead sign with endless lines and loops denoting biking trails. “By the time a new map comes out, we’ve built more trails and it’s already changed.” In Northwest Arkansas, a region anchored by the metropolitan hubs of Bella Vista, Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, and Fayetteville, to say biking is having a moment would be quite the understatement. With Bentonville as the focal point, getting around on two wheels—and partaking in the thriving art scene—is a way of life here. Over the past two decades, Tom and Steuart Walton, grandsons of Walmart founder Sam…

WRITER Stacy Willingham “Writing a thriller always feels impossible in the beginning,” says Stacy Willingham, the internationally best-selling author of suspense novels A Flicker in the Dark, All the Dangerous Things, and Only If You’re Lucky. But that’s exactly what she likes about the process. “I’m obsessed with the challenge of it all: the perfectly placed clues, the breadcrumb trail that reveals just enough at just the right times.” While her South Carolina Lowcountry surroundings often spark inspiration, as she explores in “Writing Wadmalaw” (p. 139), most weekends find her escaping the shadows of her work, basking in the sun on Sullivan’s Island or running her dog around the park with her husband and one-year-old daughter. Her fourth Southern thriller, Forget Me Not, comes out in August. Bao Ong WRITER…

ONE OF THE OLDEST TREES in Atlanta is a 305-year-old white oak. Walking around its trunk in Deepdene Park, Heather Bird Harris plucks up acorns and leaves, carrying the windfall materials back to her studio to transform into pigments and rich dyes. She’s using the handmade paint and dye for a series of paintings that will produce seasonal “snapshots” of the city’s most senior trees and healthiest forests. A team of forest managers and biologists has helped her locate the specimens and existing core samples; Clay Tucker, a dendrochronologist, then teaches Harris how to understand the stories the cores reveal. “I’m interested in using the tree as a primary source,” Harris explains. “I want to know how many ways we can understand this place that we care about.” In the…

A Celebration of Southern Food and Drink ANN KIM LOVES using corn in unexpected ways. Kim is the head chef at the Garden & Gun Club in Atlanta (founded by this magazine in 2018), and when she interviewed for the job, she had to cook a meal that would impress her future bosses. The main dish featured a Korean braised short rib, but she sealed the deal with brûléed corn butter cake with kumquat compote. Corn played a role again when she was competing in a tournament on Chopped in 2023. She made it all the way to the finals after turning a “mystery” ingredient of corn mousse cake into polenta she served with a surf-and-turf entree. “Corn is one of those flavors I grew up on,” says Kim, whose…

A MOTHER IN GINGHAM pushes a baby stroller across a gravel lot, bound for one of thirty-odd redwood picnic tables set among a stand of magnolias and oaks, beneath a water tower for the Mississippi Gulf Coast town of Gautier. Dressed in Sunday-best khakis, the young father trails, carrying two foam boxes packed with chicken curry and egg rolls. Each Sunday from ten until three, Wat Buddhametta Mahabaramee, a Thai Buddhist temple, stages a lunch fundraiser that draws churchgoing families as well as Buddhists from the Thai, Laotian, and Vietnamese communities that necklace the Gulf between New Orleans and Mobile. Three turns and three minutes off I-10, on a quiet stretch of roadway not far from an RV park, the temple compound rises from the piney woods like a blazing…

MORNING BRUNCH SERVING WARE Verdant brushstrokes lend casual elegance to this ceramic Vietri collection, which includes a pitcher ($79), plates ($36 each), and bowls ($34 each; allvietri.com). GLASSWARE Show off your fresh-squeezed juice in mouth-blown glasses by Juliska rimmed with just a hint of late-summer green ($68 each; juliska.com). LINENS Flawless broderie anglaise embroidery graces the scalloped edges of Summerill & Bishop’s coordinating set of linen napkins ($588 for six) and tablecloth ($756; allporta-nyc.com). BASKET Fill a charming woven Juliska basket with tumbles of peaches, kumquats, and bananas ripe for the taking ($250; juliska.com). VASES Wee amber bud vases from Wentworth catch the light just so—as will whatever clippings from the garden you fill them with ($25 each; shopwentworth.com). AFTERNOON COCKTAILS ICE BUCKET Offset gleaming bottles and sippers with the…

ONE HOT FRIDAY NIGHT in the late fifties, a station wagon full of McNairs—Mama and Daddy, three rambunctious boys under age six, and a newborn baby sister—scrunched to a stop beside a speaker at the Skyvue Drive-In Theatre in Dothan, Alabama. We had no clue what was coming our way. “There’s a dog movie,” Mama had said when Daddy got home from building homes all day. Mama had kids under her fingernails, kids in her hair. A dog movie was excuse enough. It didn’t take much to flush us out of our one-bathroom house on a dirt street at the edge of the South Alabama woods in the middle of August. Going to the Skyvue was a family vacation. Mama smuggled in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hiding them under…

Running a restaurant has never been easy, and these days it hasn’t gotten any simpler. Which makes these gems all the more remarkable. To compile this list, we focused on places that opened in 2023 or later and canvassed the region with the help of our most trusted food-minded contributors for spots that wowed them. Some are fancy, some just plain fun, but all make a compelling case that the South’s culinary landscape has never been richer. KISSER NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE ● Nashville has long been a great lunch town, famous for meat-and-three restaurants open from around ten to two, serving fried chicken and collards on divided lunchroom plates. Kisser, a Japanese-inspired lunch and brunch spot from the husband-and-wife chef team of Leina Horii and Brian Lea, delivers a twenty-first-century expression…

“TWENTY BACK, GUYS!” A VOICE SHOUTS ACROSS STUDIO 1A. “HERE WE GO IN FIFTEEN…TEN…” Camera operators swing their monitors into place and pull fat bundles of cable across the floor. Production assistants jostle clothing racks and prop carts through the narrow hallways. It’s a little after 8:00 a.m. in Midtown Manhattan, and the set of Today, America’s longest-running morning show, feels like tightly orchestrated chaos: part pit crew, part pirate ship. Welcome to NBC. Welcome to 30 Rock. “Nine…eight…seven…” At the center of the frenzy, and seemingly unperturbed by it, is Craig Melvin, who succeeded the much-beloved Hoda Kotb as permanent coanchor of Today’s first and second hours this past January. Now it’s a Friday in March, and Melvin has been awake since 3:45 a.m. He’s tired (he stayed up late…

ANNIVERSARY 150 Years of a Guiding Light Maryland ARISING LIKE A VISION from the Chesapeake Bay, the unexpectedly charming, Victorian cottage–like Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse has been guiding vessels for 150 years. This National Historic Landmark is “the last surviving screw-pile lighthouse still being used for navigational purposes in its original location,” says John Potvin, its current manager and a certified Chesapeake Bay Storyteller. The 1875 structure, which replaced a landlocked lighthouse inadequate for ships bound for Baltimore, needed to stand offshore to mark the precise spot of the shoal, notes Henry Gonzalez, president of the U.S. Lighthouse Society. And so the compact hexagonal structure, outfitted with decorative baluster splats, was built atop cast-iron screw piles that go down some twenty-two feet into the bay bottom. In 1939, the Lighthouse…

Moved by the Spirit ● For a number of years, I have looked forward to reading Latria Graham’s latest This Land column. From bartering peaches for bacon to making her grandmother’s chow-chow, her stories often bring back memories and a smile. The recent piece, “Blessed Assurance” (June/July 2025), however, is beautifully sobering. Her sentiment that “today’s world is testing my faith” speaks for many of us. Allan C. Jenkins Greenville, South Carolina ● I was pleased to read Latria Graham’s wonderful article on spirituals and the Fisk Jubilee Singers concert at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston. I attended this memorable concert, too, and share her deep feelings. This music is ingrained in me and moves me in a way no other music does. It was the first music I can…

ISAAC DIAL IS A BUSY MAN. The Navajo, Lumbee, and Tuscarora silversmith and jewelry artist has been traveling nonstop across the country to source pieces: combing shorelines for shells, examining gems. “I actually go to mines and pick material based on how those stones speak to me,” he says. “Highend turquoise is very rare. Some mines only produce about two hundred pounds of really exceptional material.” The exacting standards he sets for himself make his jewelry production taxing, but Dial is no stranger to pushing limits. He’s been crafting singular handiworks—delicately engraved silver cuffs; bold drop earrings inlaid with lapis and coral; high-end turquoise rings—since he began as a young apprentice in Robeson County, North Carolina, winning myriad competitions and the devoted fervor of collectors worldwide. His father, the late…

THE SHERRY COBBLER is saddled with an unfortunate reputation for fustiness. But like a great-aunt with a bawdy past, the classic has had a colorful if underpublicized journey. The drink dates back to at least 1838, when it first appeared in print. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become one of the most common American tipples. Celebrity bartender Harry Johnson described the sherry cobbler in 1888 as “without doubt the most popular beverage in the country, with ladies as well as with gentlemen.” It was also famous for being among the first cocktails sipped through a straw—intended to protect sensitive teeth from the ice in an era of questionable dental hygiene. The origin of the drink’s name is sometimes linked to a shoemaker, but that’s surely apocryphal;…

→ WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA’S Ana Shellem, the founder of Shell’em Seafood, is a one-woman show, procuring wild-caught shellfish and aquatic plants for some of the state’s finest restaurants, including Seabird, the Hackney, and Olivero. “There’s no middleman,” she says. “It’s just me and the chef.” A restaurant vet who fell in love with the marsh, Shellem follows the seasons to deliver her chefs a bounty that ranges from wild oysters to more unusual offerings, and she’s as discriminating as she is relentlessly positive. Squelching through the mud at low tide, she holds a tulip snail at eye level and tells it, “You look great, dude, but you’re staying here to get bigger!” It’s the kind of decision you can make when you’re the boss, answering only to “the low tide,…