Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2026 i Garden & Gun

Find us on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok @gardenandgun Remembering Flip ● T. Edward Nickens’s story on the passing of my friend Flip Pallot was really nicely written (Sporting Scene, December 2025/January 2026). I still catch myself wanting to tell him of something remarkable that I saw in our swamp. I think I’ll tell him anyway. Don Davis Melbourne, Florida ● Flip Pallot made me dream of fly fishing all over the world. Who knows what the afterlife involves, but hopefully he’s chasing fish again with Lefty Kreh and Jose Wejebe. I’m grateful for the inspiration he gave me to go find fish in some really beautiful places, but the fish weren’t as much fun as the stories told afterward. Paul Shibley Muskegon, Michigan ● I used to dream…

→ IF YOU THINK a freshwater mussel is little more than a rock with gills that sits sedentary on the bottom of a stream, let Paul Johnson disabuse you. “Mussels are very, very far from boring,” says the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center (AABC) malacologist (that’s someone who studies mollusks). “Things get very weird, very fast.” Johnson should know; he’s spent his career helping to demystify and conserve mussels, which are not only among the country’s most crucial cleaners of waterways, but are also its most endangered group, period. All of their weirdness ends up in service of water filtering. For starters, each mussel has a “foot,” a muscular organ extending from its shell that it uses to maneuver. Reproduction gets even stranger. Mussel larvae, called glochidia, need a way to…

HOMEPLACE A Lowcountry artist finds her muse in a cozy harborside cottage THE LITTLE BLUE HOUSE with a metal roof and long porch had always captivated the artist Elizabeth Middour. Situated just around the corner from the three-story home where she and her husband, Steve, spent twenty-one years raising their two children in the Old Village neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, the home sat in profile to the street, a petite, weathered cottage among stately early-to-mid-1800s manses. Middour had even gone inside a few times, when the retired schoolteacher who lived there in the early 2000s held Christmas gatherings—mini concerts of former students playing harps in the parlor. One day, Middour sketched the house for a painting. “We always wanted to live in this cottage,” Middour says. “On morning…

Joe ZIMMERMAN In his Nateland-produced special, Cult Classic (which Bargatze directed in Asheville), Zimmerman comes across as professorial, calm—hilariously harmless. The Davidson grad has been featured on Conan and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and says of his comedic persona, “I give off the energy of an emotional support animal. Which is unfortunate because I am going full throttle—this is a thousand percent of my energy.” And Asheville? “It’s the only place where I’ve seen a redneck and a hippie, and it’s the same person.” Paula KOSIENSKI Kosienski moved from North Dakota to Nashville a few years ago to join the city’s burgeoning comedy scene. Her pensive look onstage belies a wry humor and an uncomfortably hilarious proclivity for pausing a bit too long. Kosienski regularly appears at Zanies and also…

ARKANSAS OLD-TIMERS WILL TELL YOU THAT THE DUCKS KNOW WHERE THE OLD sloughs were. That even today, when half the woods have been cut down and turned into mile after mile of flat, featureless rice and row-crop fields, the location of those ancient, winding creek bottoms remains imprinted in their brains. That’s one explanation for why one rice field might be full of ducks when adjacent fields are empty, even though they all look similar. Somewhere in the twisted strands of those birds’ DNA, they know where those ghost bottoms are. I ask Chris Isbell if he agrees with this as we sit in his muddy gray pickup and watch ducks pour into flooded timber just beyond an Isbell Farms rice field. What Arkansans call a “rice field” is really…

→ IF YOU ENJOY reading our pages, chances are you’ll love watching them come to life at G&G’s many events in 2026. Things start popping on February 11 with a Bourbon & Bounty dinner at our new office in Charleston, South Carolina, hosted by a trio of acclaimed chefs: Thomas Bille of Belly of the Beast in Spring, Texas; Eric Cook of Gris-Gris and Saint John in New Orleans; and Orlando Pagán of Wild Common in Charleston. The dinner, inspired by land, sea, and sky, will culminate in true G&G fashion—with a tasting of Blade and Bow’s rare 22-year bourbon. Just days later, during Charleston’s annual Southeastern Wildlife Exposition, my good friend and G&G regular T. Edward Nickens and I will host a pair of talks. I get the pleasure…

“HUMOR IS THE THING THAT CAN GET YOU OUT OF DEPRESSION OR SADNESS; HUMOR IS THE TREACLE CUTTER, AND EVERYBODY NEEDS THAT” INTERVIEW Sitcom star and country legend Reba McEntire can’t quit cutting up—and cutting hits IN THE GLITTERING FIRMAMENT of country music icons, only a handful of women have reached true mononym status: Patsy. Dolly. Loretta. And of course Reba, who recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of her first record deal on the set of her NBC sitcom, Happy’s Place, now in its second season. The past year or so has brought McEntire, who is seventy, a slate of new joys (a smash country hit, a fresh season of The Voice, and her 2024 engagement to actor Rex Linn, among them), but also its share of sorrow. Last August,…

ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC A Charleston chef’s adventures in hush puppy love KELLY FRANZ WAS LOOKING for a bar snack to add to the menu at Magnolias, the busy downtown restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, where she became culinary director last summer. She wanted it to be irresistible but also somewhat healthy. “Specifically,” she says, “I was trying to figure out how to convince the ladies to eat some fried food.” So Franz started tossing around ideas with her fellow cooks. “We went on a bit of a tear,” she recalls. They kicked around creating a dish with a leafy green like kale. Someone brought up falafel, a distant cousin to hush puppies made with ground chickpeas. Why not add kale to hush puppy batter and see what happens? The…

BLOODY MARYS in tall glasses skirted with frost hit the table almost as soon as we do. Onion rings follow, breaded in panko and rising from the plate like a stack of barrel hoops. Six deviled eggs, piped with so much mustard-yellow filling the white walls bulge, circle a pile of brown-sugar-lacquered bacon strips. Two years back, to mark our son Jess’s graduation from Belmont University, this is how our family began lunch at the BrickTop’s on West End Avenue in Nashville, the lodestar in a growing restaurant group with eleven locations now scattered across the South. Toward the end of that celebration, after a Palm Beach salad layered with shrimp remoulade, pan-fried crab cakes with shoestring fries, caper-scattered trout in beurre blanc, and a sliced tri-tip striped with sauce…

IT ALL BEGAN with a plastic flask. Chris Shepherd, at the time the owner and chef of the acclaimed Houston restaurant Underbelly, was attending a dinner as a nominee for the James Beard Awards in 2014. He happened to be seated at the same table as whiskey legend Julian P. Van Winkle III, who asked him, “What are you packing?” “I didn’t even know what that meant,” Shepherd recalls. Van Winkle then clarified: “‘What’s in your flask?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have one.’ So he literally pulled from his pocket a plastic flask filled with a barrel sample and handed it to me.” Shepherd doesn’t recollect the specifics of that barrel, but it was good. Very good. “And I remember asking, what else should I be drinking?…

SUNDAYS IN THE SOUTH when I was a child were the epitome of slow living. Instead of the heart-thumping, adrenaline-pumping brrring of an analog alarm clock, our house, whether it was the duplex in Nashville or our later forever home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, would awaken with gentler sounds: the soft thip thip of my father padding to the kitchen to make his morning coffee, or the percussive rat-tat, tat-tat of my mother’s knock at my bedroom door that meant breakfast was ready. During the leanest years of my youth, when my parents worked as much as they could stand, we all survived on convenience snacks like Little Debbies and strong, hot Lipton tea during the week. Around middle school, my brother and I graduated to energy drinks, trying to…

1 HEATHER M C MAHAN Origin: Atlanta, Georgia “THROUGH PAIN COMES PROSPERITY.” Or so Heather McMahan said after she scalded her nether regions (“burnt my grundle”) with Starbucks coffee, as memorably recounted on her podcast, Absolutely Not. She should know. After the sudden death of her father from cancer in 2015, the comedian moved back in with her mom in Atlanta and, as anyone might do, took to social media to air her grief. But because she’s laugh-till-you-pee funny, she amassed a following (approaching a million across social channels) and got the break that had eluded her over years in L.A. and New York. “MY JOB IS TO SAY ONSTAGE WHAT SOUTHERN WOMEN ARE SAYING WHEN WE’RE PLAYING MAH-JONGG AND DRINKING WHITE WINE ALL NIGHT” Now with three major stand-up…

→ Riding Amtrak’s new Mardi Gras Service from New Orleans to Mobile (or vice versa) takes about four hours. ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about a train journey is how it begins: no hubbub, no ceremony. You walk on, sit down, and, when the time comes, you simply begin to roll. Forward. Out into the world. So it was one early fall morning at New Orleans’ Union Passenger Terminal. Train 24’s engineer gave two short toots of the horn, and the platform began to slide past the window. Soon we were rocking gently as we crawled past the Superdome, its purple lights cross-fading into the lightening morning sky. We creaked past the jail, a tire yard, a seafood plant, and the miniature metropolis of an aboveground cemetery, picking our way…

ADVENTURES Mexico’s San Francisco de Campeche just might be the world’s best spot for small tarpon “TARPON WERE SHOWING THEIR TAILS AND DORSALS AS FAR AS WE COULD SEE” THE FISH were jumping in the boat!” Maybe for the first time in the history of angling writing, that sentence is not literary hyperbole. But I’ll get to that in a bit. I began fly fishing for tarpon with my dad in the 1950s glory days of the Florida Keys—before poling platforms and graphite rods, before the hippie hordes of the sixties and seventies, before grouchy guides and Sea-Doos. Back then, the only tarpon I cared about catching were the big ones, and over the next fifty years, I caught my share of those all over. Then, a decade ago, I…

CONSERVATION City of Orchids Florida Goings-on in the South and Beyond JUST OUTSIDE MIAMI, the trees and grounds of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables brim with colorful orchids, a flashback to how the landscape once looked. “South Florida was an orchid paradise before development and poaching,” says Jason Downing, Fairchild’s orchid biologist and director of research. He leads the eighty-three-acre garden—which doubles as the headquarters of the American Orchid Society—in its efforts to propagate species like the ground-dwelling Florida Dancing Lady and the rare (and famous) ghost orchid. Fairchild’s thousands-strong collection, divided into rainforest, Florida hammock, and Caribbean areas, will be the main draw during Orchids in Bloom (March 14–15). The annual festival also includes growing classes, vanilla orchid–infused treats, sales of rare species, and lots of chatter…

WRITER Frances Mayes Although Frances Mayes may be best known for the life and home she created in the Italian countryside, as she documented in her best-selling memoir Under the Tuscan Sun, the author has never forgotten her South Georgia roots—including places like the Okefenokee Swamp, which helped shape her childhood (p. 112). “It’s an old connection for me, going back to my grandmother, who took the curative sulfur waters nearby and let me run wild,” she says. “The place loomed large and I’ve kept the awe.” Between her travelogues, novels, and poetry, Mayes has published more than a dozen books, along with her weekly Substack, Proceed to the Route, in which she writes about food, community, and her travels between her homes in Cortona, Italy, and Hillsborough, North Carolina.…

INSIDE KILBY, a contemporary suiting atelier in New Orleans, James Collier and his wife and creative partner Kristen Engelsen Collier’s vision for the future of style unfolds: tailored fits, slow fashion, and fabrics that make sense for the Southern heat. Named for James’s grandfather, a World War II veteran whose quiet sophistication inspired James’s early style ideals, Kilby opened in September 2024 in a bright storefront on Magazine Street, the lively and historic six-mile thoroughfare of art galleries, restaurants, and humming small businesses in the heart of the Crescent City. That spirit infuses Kilby, too. Clients sip whiskey during fittings, friends stop by to linger, and art and conversation fill the room alongside stylish and structured safari jackets, colorful sport coats cut from British blends, crisp button-downs, and timeless tuxedos.…

Kashus Culpepper Act I Alabama native Kashus Culpepper spent five years as a firefighter and EMT before enlisting in the navy. He taught himself to play guitar while stationed overseas, and after returning home, he began playing gigs up and down the Gulf Coast. He channeled all that life experience into his winsome debut, Act I. Culpepper recorded the album in Muscle Shoals, and the sonic pastiche of the legendary music town seeps into every corner of the record. Guest Marcus King rips a fiery guitar part in the anthemic “Southern Man,” while Sierra Ferrell sings on the folky duet “Broken Wing Bird.” Elsewhere, Culpepper slinks into buttery soul on “Break Me Like” and “Alabama Beauty Queen.” It’s an eclectic, engaging effort from one of Nashville’s most exciting new voices.…

The South’s landscapes have shaped some of history’s most cherished authors, and these three modern literary matriarchs are prodding that legacy forward. Lauren Groff cemented her place as a short-fiction master with 2018’s Florida, then went on to write two novels and open a bookstore, the Lynx, in Gainesville. She returns with Brawler (Riverhead), a gorgeous collection of stories traversing time, class systems, and the nation. In nonfiction, former poet laureate of Mississippi Beth Ann Fennelly delivers The Irish Goodbye (W.W. Norton), a spare-no-punches assortment of “micro-memoirs” dealing with death, love, and bribing her kids to kill slugs in her garden. Settle in for a beautiful long read with the Georgia-grown Tayari Jones’s latest novel, Kin (Knopf), a deep dive on friendship and family ties across the Deep South.…

THE RAMOS GIN FIZZ may be the most beloved drink in New Orleans—for its precarious beauty and its elysian taste. It’s been described as “drinking a cloud” and “the essence of angel feathers blended with whipped moonbeams.” It may also be the most hated drink, chiefly by bartenders tasked with making it. It’s composed of ingredients that typically don’t see eye to eye—namely, dairy and citrus—and so needs to be shaken into submission to overcome potential curdling and give the cocktail its famous lightness. The shaking time required seems to grow with every telling—sometimes two minutes, sometimes twelve. Henry C. Ramos, who invented the drink circa 1890 in New Orleans, insisted only that it be shaken until not a single bubble remained. Today, Crescent City bartenders are frequently called upon…

As with BrickTop’s, good systems also yield good results at Pal’s Sudden Service. A thirty-one-unit chain founded in 1956 in Kingsport, Tennessee, Pal’s does business only in southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee. Most locations, which present like pop-art tributes to idealized fast-food meals, operate without a dining room. Turn into one of the hyperefficient drive-throughs, buy a burger, fries, and a shake, and you’ll believe that fast food can be good food.…

I AM SITTING on the lawn in the sunshine. The grass is cool and green and bristly. I don’t move, because I’m still a baby and the world comes to me. The dog approaches, sniffing. She has a wet black nose. She has a curled tail. She has fur the color of butterscotch. I’m not afraid of her, and I put out my hand. I call her “Ginge,” though her name is Ginger. She is my first memory. What I remember about Ginger is that she is old. My brother and sister are both ten years older than I am and she is older than the both of them. She is as old as my parents’ marriage. My father tells the story of surprising my mother with her when they…

Coughing is one of the best stages of laughter. A part that’s contagious to listen to, the residue of a particular joke that’s accomplished way more than its humble intention. When a giggle capitulates into a coughing fit at a normal comedy show, the crowd might be forced to acknowledge it by chuckling along. It’s the kind of sound that’s totally audible at a club that has, say, 150 seats, and a curtain as its stage backdrop, and a stool for the comic to rest his or her drink. The comedian might pause to admire the kill, to appreciate the facial expression that would attach itself to such a reaction—the experience of workaday stand-up in a sonorous nutshell. The comedy club today isn’t like that in the slightest. Nate Bargatze…

LEANNE MORGAN SAYS she was so cute in the eighties, but I want her to know she is beautiful now. Part Mae West, part Mee-maw, at sixty she rocks an ankle-length shirtdress like a Bob Mackie gown and smokes her jokes like a pack-a-day habit of Virginia Slims. She’s got it, so she flaunts it. She’s sassy and she knows it. She is a professional all-natural consummate flirt. But the sexiest and most inviting thing about her is that she is a hoot. Every story she tells, she tells like she’s letting us in on a secret. She’s addicted to white flour and sugar. She’s afraid of summer. She feels empathy for Taylor Swift’s aching uterus and Def Leppard being forced to play night shows well into their sixties. Menopause…