Garden & Gun

One of the many delights of this job is getting reader mail. Whether you’re voicing opinions about our coverage (yes, I know it’s heresy to boil blue crabs around the Chesapeake Bay; nothing but steam for you all) or sharing a treasured family recipe

He can handle dogs. He wrangled three of them for the April/May 2017 tenth-anniversary cover of Garden & Gun. But the Chapel Hill, North Carolina–based lensman Andrew Kornylak faced a new challenge when he photographed three different mammals—dog, ho

Summertime on the South Dakota prairie is stunningly gorgeous. Hills roll on and on under a giant blue sky, and when the winds gust, the sweet smell of wheat, alfalfa, and corn silage fills the air. Enormous green fields extend nearly forever, studde

INTERVIEW On film, Ray McKinnon has punched out George Clooney (in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and been outcoached by Sandra Bullock (in The Blind Side). On TV, he played a doomed preacher on Deadwood and a crafty U.S. attorney in Sons of Anarchy. In

In a just world, Nancy Hale (1908–1988) would need no introduction. Her name would be soaked into the American book consciousness as thoroughly as those of her contemporaries F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. But the world isn’t just, as we all k

It’s a sweltering afternoon in New Martinsville, West Virginia, the sun and humidity punishing workers who are readying the stage for the opening night of the Back Home Festival, a celebration of Appalachian sounds and community set in a grassy field

When Cathy Fussell first started sewing, her hands were barely coordinated enough to hold a needle. She was only four years old then, but the following year, she attended her first quilting bee. “Every woman in my family sewed,” she says. “It was jus

Q Inviting only couples to our dinner parties is wearing thin. How do we break out of it? A Steering a plow behind a mule is tough duty. When the share gets tangled in an old stump root, or the mule gets hung up in the traces, you can have a dicken

We tell stories to remember. And when the author Pat Conroy died in March 2016 of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Cassandra King Conroy, knew there was only one way to channel her grief. “I would go back to writing,” she says. “That would be what I woul

How’s this for a quintessentially autumnal addition to a Thanksgiving spread: the glass pheasant gravy boat by Godinger, complete with a silver-plated feather serving ladle ($40; godinger.com). Naturalistic designs by the late-nineteenth-century Po

In the late 1800s, when chicken-fried steak started to catch on in Texas and beyond, cooks did what they could to tame tough, inferior cuts of meat into fork-tender submission. They pounded them with hammers, smacked them with mallets, or even took t

Trigger warning: This story involves Jägermeister. If you’re of a certain age, and you spent some of that age at fraternity parties or football games, you may suffer from traumatic memories. These may involve a liquid that tasted vaguely of cough syr

College towns are outposts of oddity in a sea of conformity. That’s the promise, anyway. When I moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1995, I fell for the Hoka, where a local named Ronzo screened art-house films and served dense and delicious fudge pies i

When chef Nick Wilber moved south from New York City last year, he pored over lists of local produce and relied on local purveyors to help him learn about unfamiliar ingredients. “I was blown away the first time I had a muscadine,” says Wilber, a Col

It’s fitting that one of the owners of Scriptura—a New Orleans letterpress studio filled with antique presses and a huge array of stunning custom and ready-to-mail stationery and invitations—claims to have the best thank-you note story ever. “There’s

What turns a hunting enthusiast or a casual sporting gun owner into an avid collector of antique and rare firearms? It often begins innocently, says Rock Island Auction Company (RIAC) president Kevin Hogan, with the flood of memory. You reach a certa

There is no room for bad feelings in the moss garden. No anxious thoughts are allowed, explains Jacquelyn Rogow as she stretches out her arms and balance-beam walks a narrow wooden bridge over a tinkling creek. Swaths of moss in every shade—olive, li

Ab Atkins III riffles through a pile of yellowed photos on his kitchen countertop in Dallas’s Devonshire neighborhood. Here’s a photo of the house Atkins grew up in, a tidy columned affair amid the tall pines in Homer, Louisiana. One of the longleaf

Ican’t remember how exactly we decided to name our dog Henry Barfight. I’m fairly certain it was the result of a late-night conversation with friends. I do know that once the name was offered up, it stuck. Henry Barfight is sweet, loyal, and charming

With the exception of my maternal grandfather, who was a baseball star at Vanderbilt and a member of Augusta National, I do not come from a sporty family. My father was known to bet on football (our bookie was the oyster shucker at Doe’s Eat Place),

At a leisurely 8:30 and run north for half an hour to a little shoreline flat. It is a pluperfect bonefish morning: cloudless; the sun just high enough at our backs for good spotting; just enough breeze, also at our backs, to riffle the water. John G

WHEN R. RANDALL ROLLINS WAS A CHILD, perhaps four or five years old, he would follow his father on their North Georgia farm, hunting quail in the rolling mountains of Catoosa County just shy of the Tennessee state line. The family had eighty acres of

WHEN HE’S NOT MANNING the pass at Kybecca, a New American bistro in Fredericksburg, Virginia, chef Wade Truong can most likely be found fishing on the Eastern Shore or waterfowling in the Northern Neck. The son of Vietnamese immigrants, Truong didn’t

I of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Gunning ringbills, mallard, wigeon, and woodies mostly, from palmetto-frond blinds in the Combahee marsh or by jumping the black-water ponds behind the barrier-island dunes on Capers, Pritchards, and Fripp. Other d

We come to a stop in a river mouth—engine cut, wash shooshing against the stern—where the mud gives off the deep, musty smell of fecundity. The early morning air is still, but everything else is astir. Insects thrum in our ears. A phalanx of ibis, sn

When a new wave of Southern theaters lit up downtowns in the first decades of the twentieth century—vaudeville playhouses in the early 1900s and movie palaces in the 1920s—no expense was too great. Intricate plasterwork decorated opera boxes and pros

To enjoy the great outdoors in style, Under Canvas is the golden ticket. The safari-inspired “glamping” tents are decked out with king-size beds, optional en suite bathrooms, and all the trimmings, while on-site dining, activities, and nearby adventu

I worked my way through college in the mid-1980s at a wholesale grocery in my hometown of Danville, Kentucky. The brick warehouses dated to the 1880s. The wooden floors were buckled with age, and holes were patched with tin cans cut into pieces and n

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood,” says the narrator, Mattie Ross, in the first lines of True Grit, the 1968 Western novel by Charles Portis and t

“That’s a well-crafted song—specifically all the internal rhymes: Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen / Pour myself a cup of ambition. We’d all love to write that opening line and have it spill out and sound so right. It’s a blue-collar ant

My friend Tom Rankin says he heard somebody call motion-activated nature-trail videos “the best thing invented in the South since the five-gallon bucket.” I like the ring of that observation. I welcome the opportunity to lead off a column with it. Ho