Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2025 i Garden & Gun

Last summer, the Garden & Gun editorial team left our headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina, and headed to New Orleans for some frolic and inspiration. The plan was to spend our days brainstorming stories for 2025, and our nights exploring the town. The trip was such a success that it spawned the cover package of the issue you’re holding. (Not to mention the fact that the city will host the Super Bowl this year just ahead of a little shindig called Mardi Gras.) And while you’ll find all sorts of smart recommendations from locals for the ultimate NOLA adventure starting on page 91, the editors couldn’t help dishing on a few of their favorites from the trip. Senior editor CJ Lotz Diego, our resident New Orleans regular, led us to…

WE ASKED... Which three famous Southerners (real or fictional) would you invite to a dinner party? In our Talk of the South newsletter, readers revealed their dream guest lists. Jimmy Carter, for his historical aptitude; Johnny Mercer, for his ideas on today’s music; and Jack Daniel, to help me decipher what the other two said. Van H. John Grisham, Morgan Freeman, and Leah Chase. Rita W. Julia Reed, Edna Lewis, and William Faulkner. Linda S. Dolly Parton, Jimmy Carter, and Duane Allman. Joan W. I would like to sit on the porch with Atticus Finch, Mark Twain, and Lewis Grizzard. What a conversation. Bill T. Margaret Mitchell, Booker T. Washington, and Hank Williams. Gay H. Sam Snead, Lee Trevino, and Arnold Palmer. David C. 1969 Elvis, Shelby Foote, and David…

As she crouches on a dock near Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, Leslie Charleville rolls a thin layer of water-based paint onto the ridged, scaly body of a freshly harvested alligator. Carefully, she lowers a canvas onto the carcass and, using her fingers, presses the fabric into her subject’s every groove and scute. Then she peels off the canvas. “And that’s the moment of truth,” says the artist, who operates L. Charleville Studios out of her home in Rosedale. If everything has gone well, there in paint lies the imprint of the gator, each line, curve, scar—even traces of its DNA—frozen on the canvas. Far from Louisiana, in the mid-1800s, Japanese fishermen devised this method for documenting a catch: They inked the fish, pressed its body onto rice paper, and scrawled the…

Anne Tyler’s “biography sounds cosmopolitan (born in Minneapolis, married to an Iranian psychiatrist, herself once a graduate student of Russian),” wrote John Updike in a 1976 review of a Tyler novel, “but she says she ‘considers herself a Southerner’; and she does apparently accept the belief, extinct save in the South, that families are absolutely, intrinsically interesting.” Updike added: “Are they?” Almost a half century and nineteen novels later, most of them devoted to family life, Anne Tyler’s answer seems not just clear but emphatic—yes, John, they most definitely are. In her latest, Three Days in June, the central family is uncharacteristically small: mom, dad, and adult daughter, or three people in June. The emotional terrain the eighty-three-year-old Tyler covers, however, is anything but small. Beneath the tidy crust of…

Neon curlicues romp and flicker across a two-story masonry building, fronted by a towering sign stacked with seeming watercolors of a crab, a fish, an oyster, and a couple of shrimp. Inside, Hunter Evans, the new executive chef and co-owner of the Mayflower Cafe in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, delivers salads scattered with feta cubes to a group of tourists tucked into a booth wrapped in butterscotch vinyl. Five minutes later, he stands facing the front window, pulling oysters from a tile trough, shucking Eagle Points raised off the coast near Biloxi. Before returning to the kitchen, Evans leans across a tabletop banded with bright chrome to ask a regular, Jean Medley, whether she wants her stuffed shrimp fried or broiled. On this warm October night, shortly after the Mayflower’s reopening…

Every morning, Delia Fian awakens to the sound of birdsong. As the dawn illuminates the valley below her home in the mountains bordering North Carolina’s Nantahala National Forest, Fian builds a fire and boils the water she brought up from the nearby spring the night before. She sips her tea as she watches the forest wake up, which, in her totally off-grid home, is the closest thing she has to watching television. Then, on days she isn’t teaching basketry, she heads to her workshop to weave. In Fian’s open-air studio—which, like her house, she and her partner built by hand with wood they harvested and milled themselves—she weaves kudzu vines into sturdy backpacks, privet bark into whimsical hats, and mimosa tree bark into slippers. As a basket maker who works…

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, two iconic restaurateurs, Leah Chase and Ella Brennan, redefined dining in New Orleans. Dooky Chase, run by Chase and her family, was radically welcoming, while Brennan’s Commander’s Palace was wildly celebratory. Both restaurants still make each diner feel like family: At Commander’s Palace, a birthday boy can expect balloons and a serenade from the band at brunch. At Dooky Chase, you might get fussed at for adding salt to your bowl of gumbo without tasting it first. Since the passing of these matriarchs, a new generation of women has taken up that mantle, helming restaurants that expand the idea of home. MELISSA M. MARTIN “My mom is a goddess,” says Melissa M. Martin, leaning back from a communal table under a chandelier…

Picture a young boy in rural Alabama in the 1950s. Dirt roads. No indoor plumbing. Farmland rolling to the horizon. The boy is sensitive, reflective. He spends much of his time—after school or when his parents are working—with his grandmother. She sits and quilts and tells him tales of her life in their native Clay County, of family and church potlucks and sing-alongs. She also talks of a devastating tornado and, later, of a gruesome triple homicide. The boy listens to her, quietly, attentively, as he lies on the floor and sketches images out of an old Sears catalogue. For a time, when the boy is four or five, his father is a policeman, and the family lives in the county jailhouse in an apartment below the cells. The boy…

Gabriela Herman PHOTOGRAPHER ■ Gabriela Herman was working right in her sweet spot while capturing portraits of Elle Duncan at the Atlanta-born ESPN anchor’s bright and cheery home (p. 25). “Natural light and color are the two driving forces in my work,” says Herman, who has also photographed for Better Homes & Gardens and Condé Nast Traveler. She often finds vibrant inspiration while traveling—to Brazil, for instance, where her mother grew up and where she spent holidays as a child, or New Orleans. “My most recent personal project was portraits of revelers in the street at Mardi Gras,” she says. “Talk about colorful vibes.” “Natural light and color are the two driving forces in my work”—Gabriela Herman, who photographed ESPN anchor Elle Duncan (p. 25) Jeremy B. Jones WRITER ■…

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTURE When Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and the undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks took the basketball world by storm last spring, Elle Duncan had a courtside seat. As the primary host of ESPN’s women’s basketball pregame coverage, the forty-one-year-old Atlanta native became the go-to voice of not only the NCAA’s March Madness nail-biters and rivalries but also the most compelling WNBA season ever. Duncan also cohosts the network’s flagship Sports-Center, on which her sports knowledge, deft pop culture references, and bust-your-chops wit leave her (mostly male) counterparts in stitches. ¶ She honed those skills on Atlanta radio, doing traffic reports and comedy bits before moving into sports and eventually television, landing at ESPN’s Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters in 2016. Along the way, she picked up a husband (a…

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINK Recipes rarely pop out of a chef ’s brain fully formed. They typically start with a little spark of an idea, and then comes the tinkering until they grow into something original and delicious, like pastry chef Rebekah Turshen’s buttermilk cornmeal cookies with sorghum marshmallow filling. “I usually have in my head what I want it to taste like and the texture and the visuals,” she says. “Then I just have to get there.” Turshen landed her first baking job in 1993 while pursuing a graphic arts degree at the University of Mississippi. “It was kind of a fluke,” she says. But as it turned out, she liked making pastry better than graphic arts. After college, she continued to work in various Oxford…

From the outside, a blood orange appears to be a typical sweet orange (with a somewhat off-putting name). But slice one open, and you can’t help but be wowed by the gemlike flesh, which can range from deep ruby red to a dark maroon-y purple. That bold, opulent appearance is why the fruit was once reserved for royalty in Sicily. Thankfully, since making their way stateside around the early 1900s, blood oranges have become widely available to citrus lovers, including chef Rob McDaniel’s own version of royalty—his seven-year-old twins, who enjoy sipping the fresh-squeezed juice as a breakfast treat. “The juice is always a fun surprise for them,” says McDaniel, the executive chef and co-owner of Helen, in Birmingham, Alabama. “It’s more than a flavor experience; it’s also visual. At…

CITIES OFTEN IMPRESS VISITORS WITH THEIR WIDE SCALE and grandeur: towering buildings, expansive parks, huge boulevards. New Orleans does none of this. In his 1875 book, The Great South, author Edward King noted of the St. Louis Cathedral, even then the city’s most iconic building, that with its mishmash of styles it was “a monument to bad taste.” King did admit, however, “the city of New Orleans is fruitful in surprises.” And so it remains. The city impresses and astonishes, often doing so with its graceful detail, with its filigreed porches and buoyant colors and views down narrow, keyhole-like alleys that reveal intricate, ancient brick courtyards. Indeed, New Orleans arguably does quiet intimacy better than any other metropolis. You’ll find it at Mahogany Jazz Hall and the Spotted Cat, where…

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOUL Despite its pint-size population—eighty-seven full-timers by last count—and rural setting, Round Top, Texas, booms as treasure hunters flock to the thrice-annual Original Round Top Antiques Fair. During the multiday events, which began in 1968, vendors sprawl across venues all over town. “What’s so cool about Round Top are not only the pieces you buy but the people you chat with,” says regular attendee Kate Towill, the creative director of Basic Projects hospitality group in Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s this unbelievable network from around the globe that comes for the shows every year.” But Round Top, which sits roughly midway between Houston and Austin, has attracted enough fanfare that it’s drawing visitors between fairs—many shops are open year-round; a new film festival launched last…

Cold weather can make anyone a little stir-crazy—or creative. When the chilly air feels like a permanent mountain fixture, the folks at Ski Sapphire Valley in Sapphire, North Carolina, transform a slope into a farcical competition during the Great Outhouse Races (February 15). Sliding sheds on skis, complete with seats and toilet paper rolls, bring new meaning to the term Porta Potti. Other fests, like Louisville’s Gravy Cup (March 1), heat the body from the inside out. This gravy-making competition at the Mellwood Art Center summons chefs of all skill levels to fight for the cup title, while visitors sit back and warm up with biscuits slathered in the gravy of champions. Even in balmy Florida, people get a little zany. In Tampa, Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla sails into…

“Every year, I order fruitcake from Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas—it’s almost as good as Mamma’s” ODE TO ROY Upon receiving my issues of G&G, I always turn to the back page to read End of the Line. There’s been a lot of wisdom, humor, and “ain’t that the truths” over the years. I feel like I’m losing a friend. Roy, whatever your future plans are, I wish you level roads and a gentle tailwind. Michael Schwartz Charleston, South Carolina For a Southern boy who grew up picking teaberries, morels, and chinquapins; going to football games and demolition derbies; and listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, Roy Blount Jr.’s absence from the back page will be painful. I hope to see him down that winding country…

Bartender Christian Favier got his first taste of punch coco on a visit to Martinique in 2019. He left intrigued—the drink was supremely tasty but wasn’t as well known as the French Caribbean island’s more famous ti’ punch, a simple mix of local rum, sugar, and lime zest. Favier began investigating, reaching out to punch aficionados and liquor importers to learn more. “All the available information was surface level,” he says. “Then you hit a wall and need to dig deeper.” Long a rum fan, Favier worked for three years as beverage manager at the Ordinary in Charleston, South Carolina, where he more than doubled the prominent seafood restaurant’s rum selection to about 125 varieties. He’s now heading up the drinks program at Seahorse, a new Charleston bar from James…

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORE When Peter Patout craves a break from the bustle that rarely slows near his Bourbon Street home, he heads west from New Orleans. He drives for two hours, crossing the Atchafalaya River and cypress bayous until he reaches his family’s property thirty miles south of Lafayette, in the hamlet that is called—no joke—Patoutville, Louisiana. Patout, who sells historic properties in Louisiana and Mississippi, steps up to the house that his grandparents built sometime around 1925, a Mediterranean Revival with a columned porch anchored in a sugarcane sea. “There’s almost always a breeze,” he says, “and the birds and crickets provide the background noise. You can smell night-blooming jasmine and butterfly ginger, along with citrus blossoms in the spring.” To the hum…

See & Do VUE ORLEANS OBSERVATION DECK New Orleans can be vexing—history, geography, culinary traditions, and various subcultures all conspire to confuse you. Get grounded by first stopping at the Vue Orleans Observation Deck, thirty-four stories above the city and right on the Mississippi River. You’ll see plainly how the river shapes the city (and vice versa) and learn about what makes this place the way it is in a series of interactive cultural exhibits. FRENCHMEN STREET The Frenchmen Street music district may be home to more brass instruments per block than any other spot on earth. A nearly countless number of clubs spill out tunes both traditional and un-. The Spotted Cat, Snug Harbor, and d.b.a. are the best known for showcasing the music that made New Orleans famous,…