Garden & Gun

“It feels a lot like a menagerie,” Julia Reed says of the cozy residence she recently finished building near her childhood home in Greenville, Mississippi, detailed in “Writer’s Retreat” (p. 110). “In addition to my very-much-alive beagle, Henry, I h

It was early April when we shipped the issue you’re holding to the printer, and the G&G team was a month in to working remotely—and to understanding the new normal and what readers would want to see in the pages. While we’re used to looking three mon

Inside the Gentilly studio of the artist and designer Annie Moran, okra flowers twine up a clear blue sky. Nearby, lotus leaves unfurl, damp against dark water, while roseate spoonbills fluff their pencil-sketched feathers. A Zulu masker blows his wh

Someday, if time is ever spare enough, I’ll get around to a daydream project of mine: a fictional map of Mississippi, its towns and counties drawn not from actual geography but instead from the many novels and stories the state has hosted. Just think

It’s impossible not to wonder what’s really going on at the compound in Cross, South Carolina, an hour north of Charleston. The one off of a gravel road in the thick of loblolly pines, with the razor-wire fence and the CAUTION and BEWARE OF DOG signs

Hunter Evans, a chef in Jackson, Mississippi, believes the history of a place can be contained in a single seed, which is why he regularly heads out into the countryside to find them. Evans, who studied hospitality management at the University of Mis

Do we have to kill all the snakes that come around? This time of year, if you’re not seeing a snake a day, you need to get out more. We very much hope you don’t run for the hoe and murder everything, though, because, in a word: kings. King snakes an

1½ cups flour1½ cups fine cornmeal1/8 cup cornstarch1 tbsp. salt, plus more for seasoning to taste1 tsp. garlic powder1 tsp. onion powder1 tsp. smoked paprika½ tsp. cayenne pepper2 cups milk2 cups buttermilk1½ lb. okra Neutral oil, such as canola, fo

Lying next to the banks of the Big Coal River in Whites-ville, West Virginia, sits a giant slab of black granite forty-eight feet long. Etched into the stone are the silhouettes of twenty-nine miners who perished in a 2010 explosion at the nearby Upp

The High Horse opened in Louisville, Kentucky’s Butchertown neighborhood last year, taking over a space that has been home to a bar since the 1930s. As Lee’s Tavern, it was the site of what the local newspaper referred to as a “battle royal” in 1950,

Virginia’s Golden Rabbit churns out some of the coolest modern enamelware around. If you’re after that vintage beach-house look for your crab boil (or “steam,” for you Marylanders), give the eighteen-quart stockpot a try ($138; food52.com). These han

If you catch chef Kelly Fields leaving the walk-in at her New Orleans restaurant and bakery, Willa Jean, chances are she has a fistful of one of her favorite summer ingredients: blueberries. “I can’t resist. They’re like the nuanced cousin of the gra

Leave it to the Bahamian designer Amanda Lindroth, the style world’s expert on the island aesthetic, to revive the notion of the sailor’s valentine. The nineteenth-century art form began out of love: Legend holds that sailors passed the time during v

From the lobby of the new Central Station Hotel in downtown Memphis, where travelers once waited for City of New Orleans trains, and where a beaded portrait of soul godfather Isaac Hayes now stands watch, my wife, Blair, and I descend the stairs to E

Leo McGee has never been ambivalent about hydrangeas. When he was a boy, his dislike for the beautiful but temperamental blooms veered toward outright hate. “I did yard work for extra money growing up,” he says. “Down in Arkansas, the weather was so

On a sunny spring day, Chris Leigh-Jones takes his 1933 Alfa Romeo 8c Monza for a spin. Stretches of new asphalt thread through the community of Palmetto Bluff, a twenty-thousand-acre expanse of estuaries and woodlands in coastal Bluffton, South Caro

He was just three months old when we brought him home from an animal shelter in rural Vermont. He was small and scared, and clung to me in the car for the forty-minute ride to his new home. When we pulled into the driveway, he promptly threw up down

“I USED SEVEN KINDS OF FRENCH VERMOUTH IN AN effort to make palatable dry martinis,” wrote Kenneth Roberts. “They were without exception execrable, although some were more execrable than others.” Roberts, a best-selling historical novelist (Northwest

The first thing I did at the dawn of our new era of social distancing, sheltering in place, hunkering down, holing up—pick your preferred term for the new normal—was to order a ham. I know, I know. Dorothy Parker said, “Eternity is a ham and two peop

MY UNCLE TRIP’S TRUCK SMELLED LIKE DIRT AND CHAIN-SAW OIL and pine straw mingled with cigarette smoke. I smell it when I think of him. The truck was a two-tone Jeep, a rust-dusted white cab over a faded copper body. I sat in his lap as we cruised the

In 1993, for the first time, I opened the screened door and walked into Threadgill’s, a down-home restaurant and longtime music hot spot housed in a former Gulf station in Austin, Texas. Pointing to this back entrance was a vintage neon arrow, hangin

Since its publication on July 11, 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired an Academy Award–winning movie and a box-office-smash Broadway play, and built a permanent nest in the Southern literary canon. “I think it’

More than nine million barrels of spirits are currently aging in Kentucky, and not surprisingly, most of them contain bourbon whiskey. That’s roughly two barrels for every person living in the state, and enough, distillers hope, to keep pace with a g

MY HOUSE IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA WAS born on a legal pad in Birmingham’s Highlands Bar & Grill over martinis with the gifted architect James Carter. That was in the winter of 2017, but its gestation had begun decades earlier. Almost ever since I’d l

THERE ARE A NUMBER OF WAYS TO SIZE UP THE IMPACT OF A PAINTING: by the number of tourists willing to squeeze into a museum gallery to catch a fleeting glimpse of it, for example, or by the small fortunes (or large ones) auction participants will bid

Say what you will about romantic island getaways, you get more bang for your buck from desert-island cartoons. Centuries of drama, from The Tempest to Gilligan’s Island, are distilled into an islet with just enough room for two people, both of them r