Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2025 i Garden & Gun

Everybody Loves Alton ● I want to see more of Alton Brown’s kitchen (“Heart of the Home,” August/September 2025)—the pantry, in the drawers. You’re teasing me! Maureen Melick Brooklyn, New York ● I’m planning a kitchen remodel and decided to get an induction cooktop. Glad to know it has Alton Brown’s seal of approval. Danielle Johnson Birmingham, Alabama ● Alton Brown is one of the few people that made cooking enjoyable to learn when I was a kid. Around the time of Bill Nye the Science Guy, he brought that same educational learning to the cooking experience. Ernie Bruno New Orleans, Louisiana ● I particularly loved the photo of Alton Brown on the floor of his kitchen with his beagle mix. I see a Good Dog story—or three—in his future.…

THE RECTANGULAR BOX on the front doormat is sealed with packing tape bearing mysterious script. The cursive words whisper about the contents, an imperative regarding what’s inside: “Welcome to the Club…Shhh!” When the tape rips away, the cardboard lid pops open to reveal not a skeleton key or a talismanic charm, but…a necktie. And according to the tie’s maker, Nathan Green, wearing it will now be an initiation of sorts—into a “secret society” of men who still don them. The example in the box, a handsome silk number with navy, neon pink, and turquoise block stripes, cradled in a cirrus of tissue paper, speaks to the mission of his company, named (naturally) Secret Society Neckwear. “Before you open your mouth, people will see you,” Green says. Green, who is forty-two,…

THE WRITERS Jim Harrison (1937–2016) and Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) might have seemed, on the surface, to have little in common. A scion of a moneyed East Coast family, Matthiessen grew up in New York City and Connecticut and in the boarding schools he attended before entering Yale; Harrison, the son of a county farm agent, grew up in rural Michigan in a house so small that one sibling slept in a hallway. After graduating from Yale, Matthiessen worked as a CIA operative in Cold War Paris, where he cofounded The Paris Review; that same decade, after temporarily dropping out of Michigan State University, Harrison reputedly signed up to fight alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba, although his brief flirtation with revolutionary politics might’ve been owing to the “free donuts [and] radical…

NEWMAN MILLER GRAVITATED toward the culinary world from a young age. During family road trips, he’d collect menus from restaurants throughout the South. “I was doing pre-internet research,” he jokes. When he was seven, the Kentucky native wrote a letter to Sullivan University in Louisville, kindly alerting them that he planned to enroll in the Culinary Arts Program. “I graduated high school at seventeen and started culinary school twelve days later,” says Miller, now the chef and co-owner of Mr. Tubs, a bar in Bardstown with light bites and plenty of bourbon. “I was just certain about what I wanted to do.” Another certainty is that whether he’s making meatballs, Bolognese, or stock, or straight-up juicing or pickling them, carrots regularly appear in his rotation. One of his favorite varieties…

The Best of Southern Homes, Gardens, Style, and More “THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF PRECISE BRUSHSTROKES MIMIC A DUCK’S FEATHERS SO FAITHFULLY YOU’D SWEAR YOU COULD RUFFLE THEM” WHEN BEHOLDING for the first time a Jett Brunet decorative decoy on display, there is a reflexive moment of wonder at how a live duck has been persuaded to pose stock-still inside a glass case. Brunet’s best work, incorporating superlative woodworking and painting, is just that lifelike, akin to a high-definition, three-dimensional photograph. “Decorative carvers further the detail and realism from the decoys that were carved to hunt with in the late 1800s,” says Brunet, who is sixty-one, from his tree-shaded studio in Cut Off, Louisiana, about sixty miles southwest of New Orleans and an easy stroll from Bayou Lafourche. “You look at…

MUCH TO OUR parents’ chagrin, my wife and I adopted Layla out of wedlock. We were both raised in the Bible Belt. A dog wasn’t as bad as moving in together prior to tying the knot, but it was close. Maybe I’m not giving our parents enough credit. Maybe they just didn’t think we were ready for such a commitment. I was about to start my first year as a high school teacher and coach, while Mallory was working night shifts at a nearby hospital. We were busy, but damn, we wanted a dog. Not just any dog. A blue-eyed dog. The bluer the better. Fast-forward a few weeks, and we were sitting outside a Harps supermarket in Marshall, Arkansas, watching a woman slide out of a Dodge with not…

Affiliation: AUBURN UNIVERSITY’S ALABAMA NATURAL HERITAGE PROGRAM Location: AUBURN, ALABAMA Ask Jim Godwin what he does for a living, and he’ll make it sound as if he spends most of his time cruising Alabama’s rivers in search of turtles. Ask anyone who works with him, and they’ll tell you he is the driving force behind mapping out ranges, conducting surveys, and providing a vital baseline of knowledge for all manner of species in this global hot spot for turtle diversity, all essential data in a time when the reptiles are declining worldwide. As the aquatic zoologist with the Alabama Natural Heritage Program at Auburn University—a position he’s held since 1992—Godwin has pieced together grants to study and conserve mussels, fish, salamanders, and snakes (he led the effort to reintroduce the…

Affiliation: NORTH CAROLINA WILDLIFE RESOURCES COMMISSION Location: ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA Lori Williams often can’t believe her luck: She’s a herpetologist who landed a gig in Western North Carolina—the planet’s hot spot for salamander diversity. “It’s like being an artist in Paris,” she says. As the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission’s lead amphibian biologist, Williams oversees the study and conservation of the numerous species inhabiting the region’s nooks and crannies. To name a few: the rock-face-dwelling Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander; the Collinses’ mountain chorus frog; feathery-gilled mudpuppies; the Weller’s salamander, a gold-flecked denizen of high-elevation spruce-fir forests; and the Eastern hellbender, a two-foot-long resident of cold rivers and streams. To help protect these endemic wonders, Williams conducts population surveys, works with landowners on wildlife-friendly land-management practices, and partners with other…

ANNIVERSARY A Hundred Grand Ole Years Tennessee SINCE IT DEBUTED as WSM Barn Dance in 1925, the Grand Ole Opry country music broadcast has changed names, moved venues, and grown in countless other ways, often alongside the genre itself. The Grand Ole Opry House, situated off Music Valley Drive just outside downtown Nashville, opened in 1974, but the show periodically ventures back to its former home at the Ryman Auditorium. “The Opry is a living, breathing community,” explains Dan Rogers, the Opry’s senior vice president and executive producer, who counts fans among the community’s ranks along with artists and staff. “It is always evolving—looking toward the future, but respectful of its past.” On November 28, the Opry will commemorate its first hundred years with an official birthday show, and additional…

“WATCHING TV WHEN EVERYONE ELSE IS—THAT IS A SHARED EXPERIENCE, LIKE WHEN YOU’RE AT THE BALLPARK AND EVERYBODY SINGS THE SONG AT THE SAME TIME” Your Guide to Southern Culture OVER FOUR DECADES of documentary filmmaking, Ken Burns has become almost as much of an American icon as his subjects. His sui generis style of bringing the country’s seminal history to life—the Civil War (his series on the subject catapulted him into the lexicon in the 1990s), the Roosevelts, the national parks, and Vietnam, among other topics—has become such a cultural fixture that Apple named one of its iMovie editing tools “the Ken Burns effect.” Now he’s tackling the country’s origin story. In his farmhouse office in Walpole, New Hampshire, surrounded by his collection of quilts, Burns gives a behind-the-scenes…

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, Shooter Jennings has been an in-demand producer, working with the likes of Brandi Carlile, Tanya Tucker, and Charley Crockett. But with some rare free time in the summer of 2024, he began tackling a project that had been gnawing at him: sorting through hundreds of finished songs recorded by his late father, Waylon Jennings, that had sat untouched since getting transferred to digital drives in 2008. As Jennings camped out at L.A.’s Sunset Studios 3, it felt, he says, “like going through a box that has this whole chapter of your father’s life in it that you never knew.” Songbird—out in October—is the first result of that work, and a shoo-in for best country album of the year lists. The ten songs, recorded from 1973…

A Celebration of Southern Food and Drink AS JOBS GO, there are worse options. Nora Ganley-Roper and Adam Polonski are cofounders of Lost Lantern Whiskey, an independent bottler based in Vermont. The married couple are essentially whiskey prospectors: They roam the country’s burgeoning craft distillery scene in search of unique and exceptional offerings. Then they buy barrels—sometimes blending them, sometimes bottling them as is—and release the whiskey under the Lost Lantern label, with the distilleries given full billing. Their slogan: “Shining a light on the independent spirit.” Independent bottling isn’t new. It’s how a lot of Scotch and cognac reached drinkers over the past couple of centuries—distillers made the spirit, and bottlers handled branding and distribution. In the United States, however, that division of labor has been far less common,…

PELICANS WADDLE and hop around a stainless-steel table, worked by two men wearing aprons that nearly graze the cement floor. Behind them, shrimp boats and trawlers bob in the rippled current. Seen through the screened doors that frame the scene, the boats turn pointillistic, like a painting Georges Seurat might have made if he’d spent a summer on the Texas Gulf Coast. After a late lunch at Katie’s Seafood House, which straddles piers 19 and 20 on the Galveston Channel, I’ve walked two doors down to survey the market, owned by the same family, where the restaurant sources its fish and shrimp. At the rear of a corrugated metal building lined with bins of crushed ice and clear-eyed fish, I watch those men behead red snappers that could pass for…

Affiliations: ECOSYSTEMS PROTECTION SERVICE; FIVE OAKS DUCK LODGE Location: SEARCY, ARKANSAS The preservation of duck habitat is no simple matter, as Jody Pagan will be the first to tell you. Luck into catching the longtime Arkansas duck conservationist and biologist during the one hour a month he spends in his office (“I drive for a living”), and he’ll fill your ear with phrases like moist soil management and green-tree reservoir management. Yet when expressed in layman’s terms, the formula that’s brought Pagan success, from his native Arkansas clear down to South America, is pretty simple: “Think about the diversity of products in a Walmart Supercenter—everything from home and garden [products] to milk,” Pagan says. “Just like that puzzle, there are pieces of habitat diversity and habitat structure we have to…

Affiliation: ARCHBOLD BIOLOGICAL STATION’S BUCK ISLAND RANCH Location: LAKE PLACID, FLORIDA On Buck Island Ranch, 300 bulls and 2,500 cows rotate and graze across 10,500 acres. Sure, this south-central-Florida spread turns out enough beef to put it among the state’s top twenty ranches, but it’s also an ecological laboratory—one revealing crucial insights into how working lands can benefit the environment and remain financially viable for ranchers, thanks to Betsey Boughton, Buck Island’s director of agroecology, and her team. Historically, prairies and savannas that frequently burned and flooded covered this strip of the Sunshine State, producing an ideal refuge for all manner of birds, insects, reptiles, and amphibians—roseate spoonbills, wood storks, and indigo snakes among them—as well as far-roaming mammals like Florida panthers and black bears. Development has drastically reduced that…

JJ APODACA ▶ As executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy in Asheville, Apodaca works at the landscape and species level to conserve some of the South’s most endangered animals, including bog turtles, Black Warrior waterdogs, and hellbenders. In 2023, G&G selected the geneticist as a Champion of Conservation, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service awarded him its Theodore Roosevelt Genius Prize. DAYNE BUDDO ▶ Jamaica native and marine scientist Buddo brings decades of expertise in marine policy and protection to his current role as a regional project coordinator at the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism, which encourages the responsible use of the region’s fisheries and other aquatic resources—know-how he cultivated during his previous stints as the Georgia Aquarium’s director of global ocean policy and director of San Francisco’s Bay Academy.…

Travel and Adventure for the Southern Soul IF YOU DON’T GO everywhere, you’re not going to find everything,” says the Palm Beach and New York interior designer Celerie Kemble of the antiques-hunting trips she can’t stop taking. Every region of the South speaks of its history through the handmade furniture and small goods that were either created or collected there. “With antiques, the quality is often far more enduring,” Kemble says. “If you have the good luck of finding something you like, you’ve found soul and serendipity.” Find out for yourself by setting your route (or your browser) for any of these handpicked troves. HEIRLOOM HOT SPOT Olde English District, South Carolina “All the things that made this area a winter colony for the elite sporting community in the nineteenth…

ILLUSTRATOR Mark Harris Mark Harris began experimenting with collage in 2015, in between gigs as a graphic designer, compiling photographs, newspaper clips, and bits of ephemera into imaginative photo-illustrations. “It was a way to be creative while looking for a new job,” says the Philadelphia-based artist, who studied graphic design at Miami International University of Art & Design. “Some of my explorations during that time were related to my experience as the only Black creative in every position that I held during my career, and things in the news that were happening to Black people.” For “The Krewe of Mickey” (p. 122), Harris turned his eye to the ways Disney has long drawn inspiration from New Orleans, pulling from images of Creole culinary legend Leah Chase, theme-park attractions, and the…

COME FALL in the Texas borderlands, forty-nine young Northern aplomado falcons—freshly fledged and not yet adorned with their dappled orange, white, and black adult plumage—will be honing their hunting skills and scoping out territory. The presence of the juvenile birds, born this past spring in the wild to wild parents on the state’s rugged grasslands and barrier islands, is nothing short of a miracle. Historically, this medium-sized falcon patrolled the prairies of the Southwest and Mexico down into South America, using its impressive agility to hunt songbirds, reptiles, insects, and small mammals. The raptors were also so strikingly beautiful that Spanish explorers took them to Europe to serve as royal hunting falcons. But as time and colonization marched on in the New World, overgrazing, fire suppression, and invasive species degraded…

GREAT DISHES USUALLY have great genetics. One recipe inspires another, and then along comes a cook who takes the dish in an entirely new and delicious direction. That’s the story behind Jeffrey Compton’s warm prosciutto dressing, which he uses to elevate crispy Brussels sprouts at Armour House in Birmingham, Alabama, a brasserie in a historic downtown building where he has been the executive chef since it opened last fall. The idea started when he was contemplating a way to update baby spinach salad with warm bacon dressing, which anyone who ate at a restaurant in the 1980s remembers. Take the concept back a generation further and you’ll find kil’t lettuce, the classic and thrifty Appalachian preparation that wilts greens in a hot dressing of bacon fat and vinegar. With those…

TO BE CLEAR, you can appreciate Axe & Awl Leatherworks’ appealing lineup of leather goods even if you’re not the sort of person who up and runs into a burning building. But it doesn’t hurt the brand that many of its customers wouldn’t hesitate to do just that. In its inviting, exposed-brick showroom in downtown Waynesville, North Carolina, you’ll see all manner of leather items on display, most of them made in a workshop just across town: sleek totes with solid brass fasteners, sling-style cross-body bags, burly duffels, and guitar straps, to name just a few. But you’ll also probably spot an off-duty firefighter or two, browsing through first-responder gear along with the townies and tourists perusing belts and custom dog collars. “I never pictured leaving the fire department, honestly,”…

Affiliations: PANTHER CLAN OF THE MICCOSUKEE TRIBE; BUFFALO TIGER AIRBOAT TOURS Location: BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE, FLORIDA Betty Osceola recalls when subsisting in the Everglades was possible: Her mother and grandmother grew up there in chikee huts on tree islands, growing corn and pumpkins and eating wild game and fish. Osceola herself grew up in a Miccosukee village by the Tamiami Trail, and spent days exploring barefoot, hunting and fishing with her father, and absorbing the ethos of stewardship woven into the Miccosukee way of life. Today her homeland is beset by threats. The Everglades have shrunk by more than half. Native wildlife is dwindling. Still, much remains to save, and Osceola has dedicated her life to doing just that. More than a decade ago, she took over Buffalo Tiger…

ONE OF THE WORST MISTAKES a turkey hunter can make is to become obsessed with a single bird. You spend a month in a chess match with one gobbler who beats you again and again, and before you know it, the season is over. Mountain turkeys, in particular, seem to have a propensity for whittling hunters down to nothing. But if time has proved anything, it is that I am a glutton for punishment. The first turkey to ever consume me made his living on a small stretch of flat ground along the side of a mountain, a bench no bigger than a basketball court. I found him while shed hunting a section of North Carolina’s Nantahala National Forest. He roosted a good two-hour walk from the truck straight uphill…

WHEN I WAS TEN years old, my father and two friends of his bought a small lake in the country some forty-five minutes from Birmingham, Alabama, where we lived. They purchased the lake and eighty acres surrounding it in November, and over the winter my father supervised the building of a two-bedroom cabin on its shore, which, along with his demanding business, kept him too occupied to take himself or me fishing in the lake. “Water’s too cold anyway,” he said to mollify me. “We’ll go in the spring when the bass are on the beds.” So it is a mid-March day, my first outing on what my mother has named Lake Tadpole, though at fifteen acres it is more a large farm pond than a lake. My father is…