Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2025 i Garden & Gun

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH Meet Gryphon, a four-year-old golden retriever whose determined leap off a dock earned him a perfect ten from G&G editors—and the top spot among more than three thousand entries in our annual Good Dog Photo Contest. “He’s a great reason to get up every morning,” says owner Anne Lowry. Taking the prize in our sporting category is two-year-old Pudelpointer Lone Ranger, shown here on a duck hunt in Louise, Mississippi; when he’s not in the field with owner Payton Lockey, Ranger is stealing licks of whipped cream. The puppy category found a winner in Jetti, an adorable “Heinz 57” mix who enjoys the sand but isn’t so sure about the ocean, says owner Mark Townsend. Each pup will receive a prize package from our contest partner, Eukanuba.…

Swaying date palms, drifts of flowering bougainvillea, an aura of romance—the American siblings Pat Starr and Amos Morrill had these elements of Antigua in mind when they began a resort-wear company there in 1949 called Coco Shop. Inspired by the Caribbean island they called home, their premise was straightforward: Sew easy-to-wear-in-the-heat silhouettes in 100 percent cotton emblazoned with Morrill’s sketches of the native flora and fauna. For almost seventy years, that hyperlocal approach beguiled the jet set and locals alike. Their boutiques in the capital, St. John’s, and at the Antiguan airport thrived. After the deaths of Starr and Morrill, though, Coco Shop eventually closed in 2017—just as Taylor Simmons was graduating with her MBA, with an eye on retail. Simmons, whose grandparents were the founders’ neighbors on Antigua, had…

On the East Coast, football is a cultural experience,” the Alcorn State coaching legend Marino Casem once said. “In the Midwest, it’s a form of cannibalism. On the West Coast, it’s a tourist attraction. And in the South, football is a religion, and Saturday is the holy day.” Just how and why college athletics—not only football but also basketball, baseball, and other intercollegiate sports—evolved from casual undergraduate recreation into that cultural experience, cannibalistic mayhem, tourist attraction, and secular religion is what Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin, scholars at Mississippi State University and the University of Kentucky, respectively, chronicle in College Sports: A History. It’s a sweeping, stout, illuminating read for this time of year, as ancient-seeming rivalries are clashing and timeworn ceremonies—rubbing Howard’s Rock, rolling Toomer’s Corner, chanting…

THIS LAND Sunburned, dehydrated, and a little out of sorts, I’m beginning to wonder why I have agreed to this early-morning fishing excursion with my brother at, of all places, Walt Disney World. My relationship with Nicholas has frayed; I would say “in recent years,” but our friction goes back decades. We now only exchange the occasional frosty text about our mother’s health. Yet here we are, at the end of a few days’ journey at the Happiest Place on Earth, attempting to reconnect over our shared loves of Disney and nature—in this case, angling for bass. I adjust my aviators, and we board the twenty-one-foot pontoon, both of us relieved for some quiet time out on Bay Lake, in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom, after elbowing through the…

Winner MEATCRAFTERS Duck Breast Prosciutto Landover, Maryland Duck breast prosciutto, Debra Moser admits with a tinge of guilt, is her “favorite child.” And she and her husband, Mitchell Berliner, have raised a large family of meats that includes sausage, bacon, and an array of charcuterie they sell through their Maryland company, MeatCrafters. For the “unsuccessful retirees,” it’s the latest chapter in long food-centric careers. With a culinary school certification in pastries, Moser once ran a part-time sweet and savory pie company; Berliner worked in farmers’ markets in the seventies before moving into frozen food distribution (they still own Central Farm Markets, a collection of markets in the D.C. area). During one ultimately futile run at retirement, Berliner decided to take on one of his longtime loves: salami. He and Moser…

Winner Anna Heineman Custom Plates Gainesville, Florida Despite decades of admiring art and a deep pull toward creativity, Anna Heineman felt as a young adult that she wasn’t talented enough to be an artist. Instead, she earned a PhD in art history, taught the subject at the University of Florida, and cofounded a brewery with her husband and another couple. Then, last February she took a pottery class, and more than clay was transformed. “It was a return to my first love,” she says. An Instagram post showing that class’s fruit—a hand-painted depiction of her house on a simple platter—unleashed a flood of followers requesting she capture their abodes on dinnerware, too. “The feelings evoked by ‘home’ really resonate with people,” Heineman says. Her other designs, such as bright, fanciful…

John Grisham WRITER For John Grisham, the Mississippi-raised author who spends most of the year on his farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, some of the greatest joys of the holiday season happen around the table. “We go to Mary Mahoney’s in Biloxi on Christmas Eve after church and have a late brunch on Christmas Day with scrambled eggs, caviar, biscuits from Callie’s, and Champagne,” he says. The season also provides a well-deserved break for the author of fifty consecutive bestsellers, beginning with 1991’s The Firm. His latest release, Framed, is a nonfiction examination of wrongful convictions. “I work with the Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries,” he says. “And we labor, often in vain, to free the innocent.” For this issue’s Good Dog column (p. 82), Grisham shares the story—and take-charge personality—of…

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTURE In September 2021, during the annual AmericanaFest in Nashville, Black Opry founder Holly G waited at an East Nashville Airbnb to see who might join her there. The organization was still nascent; Holly had started it as a blog several months earlier, mainly as a way to connect with other Black country music fans. But as word of Black Opry spread, it became clear to her that it had the potential to grow into more than an online hub, so she had arranged a gathering to try to further the momentum. “There were a few Black artists that played AmericanaFest, but they weren’t supported once they left the stage,” Holly says from her home in Nashville, where she moved in 2022 from her native Virginia.…

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINK Gin and summer have long had a storied relationship. The merest sip, especially if enhanced with quinine, will for many bring forth balmy memories: the ceaseless thwock of tennis balls, the aggressively hygienic aroma of a chlorinated swimming pool. But gin has had a winter side hustle since at least Victorian times. It can even comport itself well at a holiday gathering. The key is to warm it up. “Hot gin punch” may not sound all that inviting—none of the three words play especially well together—but it turns out the Victorians were onto something. Perhaps no one was more responsible for its popularity than Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol (1843), Dickens wrote that Bob Cratchit “compounded some hot mixture in a jug…

FORK in the ROAD A cybersecurity tech named Peter, down from Philadelphia on vacation, dines solo at the horseshoe bar in the main dining room at the Grey, the Savannah restaurant with a gleaming art deco vibe that chef Mashama Bailey and entrepreneur Johno Morisano opened downtown in December 2014. To Peter’s left, glass doors lead to the bays where, beginning in 1938, Atlantic Greyhound Lines buses picked up and dropped off passengers. To his right, a server beelines from the kitchen, headed for a Saturday-night birthday party in the private dining room upstairs. Moving by the worn spot in the terrazzo floor where customers once stood to purchase tickets, toward the sign on the back wall that marks where Black passengers waited, the server weaves past silver statues of greyhound…

COUNTRY ACCENT In my nearly twenty years as a chef, I’ve painstakingly exalted almost every classic Southern recipe out there. I plucked banana pudding from the cold case, pumped it with nutty notes of sesame, and heated it up the way my mom used to. I eradicated the mushy, odorous qualities of slow-stewed collards by crisping them up in the fryer. I iced red velvet cake with torched meringue so those eating it would think of snow. I boiled green peanuts with red curry and coconut and dressed up grits so much that they came to define an entire section of my restaurant Chef & the Farmer’s menu. But what I would never touch with a pair of ten-foot tweezers is the ole holiday fruitcake. It’s not that I hate…

Overall & Home Winner HECHIZO Ceramic Lamps Richmond, Virginia Hechizo means ‘spell’ or ‘magical charm’ in Spanish,” says the ceramic artist Hali Armstrong of the name of her design firm, and her pieces indeed bewitch. She launched the company out of her Brooklyn apartment in 2014 with hand-painted ceramic jewelry—small talisman-style pieces symbolizing adventure, fertility, and creativity—that quickly attracted fans and big-name retailers such as Anthropologie and New York’s ABC Carpet & Home. But when a move to Richmond to be closer to family yielded a larger studio space and a bigger kiln, Armstrong felt her artistic instincts pulling her in a new direction: ceramic light fixtures. She first made playful, fashion-inspired sconces and then table lamps, including both a twelve- and a twenty-two-inch option in a textural floral and…

Winner EDA RHYNE DISTILLING COMPANY Appalachian Fernet Asheville, North Carolina Chris Bower and Rett Murphy founded Eda Rhyne Distilling Company in 2017 with a simple but ambitious goal: to create spirits that capture the essence of Appalachia. Although Hurricane Helene devastated much of Western North Carolina in September—including Eda Rhyne’s Biltmore Village distillery in Asheville and its trove of aging spirits—it couldn’t dampen their determination. “We’re lucky we have a second location in Weaverville that was unscathed,” Murphy says. “So we’re going to clean up and persevere.” Bower grew up in the North Carolina hills learning about medicinal plants from his parents and grandparents, later spending time in Italy studying the bitter liqueurs traditionally enjoyed before and after meals to aid digestion. “I started looking into the history, and soon…

Forget a vista or a visitors’ center. Forget aesthetics entirely, and infrastructure, too. Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge sits in rural West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Crossed by several ATV trails and a single gravel road, it otherwise consists of thirteen thousand acres of unadorned swamp forest. That makes for a place alluring to mink and bobcats, but not to many humans—a fact that may be reflected in what the French first called the creek that drains these woods: Rivière à la Chaude pissie, the river of hot piss. But Cat Island has, for me, become a site of annual pilgrimage. It helps to know that this refuge is tucked at the foot of the bluffs that line the Mississippi River, thirty miles north of Baton Rouge, in some of the…

Few desserts have more polarizing power than fruitcake. Both loved and loathed, the sticky concoction of dried fruits, nuts, and often alcohol has been around for centuries—fitting, as it’s perhaps best known for its lengthy shelf life (one family in Michigan has held on to a fruitcake made by an ancestor—for 141 years). Although fruitcake lineage can be traced to ancient Rome, its popularity grew in the United States with the introduction of the Rural Free Delivery and parcel post service in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas, founded in 1896, capitalized on this and became the country’s first mail-order fruitcake company. These days, the bakery’s pecan-studded desserts, tucked in red tins, are still a popular holiday gift. Fans and haters alike may find…

“My sister would probably have been arrested when she pulled a cast-iron skillet out of the overhead bin” BETTER NATURES Bernie Kuhajda is a national treasure and champion of aquatic conservation. Thank you for bringing attention to his work in the feature about your Champions of Conservation (“Saving the Southern Wilds,” October/November 2024). Helaina Gomez Chattanooga, Tennessee I grew up snorkeling and diving the reefs of South Florida. It’s tragic what’s happening to them, but it’s encouraging to see heroes like Beatriz Chachamovits stepping up to do something about it. Steve Rice Hollywood, Florida Back in the seventies, when I was eleven years old, my mother gave me the National Geographic Society’s book Song and Garden Birds of North America, which came with a small 45 record that you could…

As soon as Sarah Lamb takes the fowl out of the freezer, the clock starts ticking. In a few days, the game—a tawny woodcock and a larger, gray-and-brown ruffed grouse—will start to smell…well, foul. That means Lamb has a limited time to perfectly position the birds against a backdrop in her Houston home studio and then paint a precise, detailed depiction of them on a stretched canvas. “I once had a turkey in my studio for seven days,” she recalls in her South Georgia brogue. “It got pretty gamy.” She poses the woodcock and grouse upside down, their beaks pointing in opposite directions, against an old Charleston-green wooden shutter. Her studio is filled with a variety of such timeworn props—pedestals, boxes, doors—for her still lifes. Light coming in from the…

Nikko Cagalanan has been serving arroz caldo, the poster child of Filipino comfort food, ever since he opened Kultura in 2023, during a hot Charleston, South Carolina, summer. “I tell everyone this is my favorite dish on the menu because it reminds me of my grandmother’s cooking,” he says. “It’s what she makes when she’s sick or the family is sick.” Arroz caldo is essentially a warm rice porridge traditionally made with chicken. But that description belies a dish that is both comforting and subtly complex. Its likable cousins include Chinese congee and Korean juk. It’s soupier than purloo, the one-pot Lowcountry standard with roots in West Africa, so the closest Southern corollary might be old-fashioned chicken and rice made with lots of broth. In Cagalanan’s version, garlic and ginger…

An omelet stuffed with deviled crab, biscuits drenched in sausage gravy, fried whiting in a white-bread envelope: Breakfasts and lunches at Narobia’s Grits and Gravy, just south of downtown Savannah, restore faith in excellence on the near side of the ten-dollar-a-plate barrier. Best of all is chef Renee Reid’s smothered shrimp, laced with onions and green peppers. Served atop a puddle of grits, that brown gravy is as honest and acute as a Kevin Young poem.…

GOOD DOG Wag Monthly caught up with John Grisham and his wife, Renee, on their farm in central Virginia. How would you describe your dog?JOHN GRISHAM: He’s not my dog. He owns the porch, demands a morning walk, expects a bowl full of food throughout the day, growls at me when I enter my own bedroom, and sleeps on my side. But he’s not my dog. Okay, perhaps we should talk to Renee.JG: Good idea. Okay, Renee, tell us about your dog.RENEE GRISHAM: His name is Scout, and he’s mostly black with a smudge of white on his lower lip, like he just had a slurp of milk. His chest is white. When looking online for a dog to rescue, I hoped to find a flat-coated retriever, and Scout may…

COME DECEMBER ON New Providence Island, situated 184 miles southeast of Miami in the Bahamian archipelago, there are no crackling fires or evergreen boughs covered in frost. No horse-drawn sleighs or icy snowmen. And the closest you’ll get to a white Christmas is strolling one of the island’s famed alabaster beaches overlooking the blue-green Atlantic shallows. (Admittedly, not a bad trade-off.) Regardless, the holidays arrive with the same sense of whimsy and wonder, especially for the friends and family of Amanda Lindroth, the renowned hostess and South Florida–raised interior designer. Rather than leaning on traditional Rockwellian trappings, the region’s yuletide magic results from both the island’s diverse global community and general conviviality that extends well beyond the season. It was this spirit that captured the imagination of Lindroth, who first…

Winner PARKER BOOT COMPANY Bespoke Boots Houston, Texas “I was a client before I was a maker,” says Zephan Parker of founding Parker Boot Company, which fashions classic and contemporary shoes without modern machinery. Parker began collecting boots in 2012, reigniting a latent creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. He began honing his craft with a series of apprenticeships at some of Texas’s most storied boot makers, including Jass Boot Shop in Lampasas and Houston’s Wheeler Boot Company, both now shuttered. As demand for American-made goods surged, Parker struck out on his own in 2014, offering repairs and other simple services. Word quickly spread, and today Parker and his team conceptualize, cut, and hand build designs that are as distinctive as the wearer: glossy black alligator dress boots, understated whiskey-hued roper boots,…

Winner BURLS AND STEEL Southern Sportsman Collection Charleston, South Carolina After he snapped the tip off a Buck knife while tinkering around the farm, Ben Spurrier, a horse trainer at the time, made a replacement from a farrier’s rasp and a deer antler. “All I wanted was a better tool,” he says, “but the whole thing snowballed.” Eight years on, Burls and Steel, the knife-making business he operates out of Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, Sydney, is now a full-time gig, and Spurrier has graduated from using hammers from Harbor Freight and a cheap, nondescript forge to custom bladesmithing tools and a top-of-the-line Chile forge. His latest release, the three-knife Southern Sportsman Collection, grew out of Spurrier’s passion for fishing. The bird and trout knife sports a three-inch blade…

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOUL Served with a tiny mountain of caviar or just a squeeze of lemon, oysters always feel celebratory. And all along Southern waterways, there are plenty of reasons to cheer. Oyster populations are on the rise in the Chesapeake Bay, where farmers, conservationists, and businesses joined together to restore reefs. And both Southern coasts—the Atlantic and the Gulf—are experiencing a surge in oyster farming, which takes pressure off wild harvests. Joining the party, these new Southern oyster bars bring all that gustatory abundance straight to the people. TAKE-TWO TRIUMPH The Syren Naples, Florida The week the Syren planned to welcome its first diners in 2022, Hurricane Ian slammed into Naples, flooding the waterfront space. After a total rebuild debuted in January 2024, guests have…

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