Garden & Gun

Sid Mashburn is an icon in the men’s fashion business. However, I disagree with his take on flip-flops and men’s sandals (Southern Conundrum, June/July 2024). There is no occasion when a man’s feet are attractive. While exceptions can be made for poo

David DiBenedetto Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Creative Director Marshall McKinney / Photography and Visuals Director Maggie Brett Kennedy Executive Editor Amanda Heckert / Managing Editor Stacy Hollister / Deputy Editor David Mezz Art Dir

YOUR GUIDE TO SOUTHERN CULTURE In the exurbs of Charlotte, Paul Finebaum walks outside his ESPN office and drives to Smoothie King. He has only thirty-five minutes before The Paul Finebaum Show begins live on the SEC Network, and in a purple blazer a

■ “My favorite thing to do is go hiking and decompress, especially in the mountains,” says Melissa Koby. Slight problem: She lives and works in Tampa. “Do I love living in flatland Florida? Not always, but I do love being among the trees, greenery, p

From left: Crouser: Action Plus Sports Images/Alamy Stock Photo; Montalvo: Xinhua/Alamy Stock Photo; Johnson: Orange Pics BV/Alamy Stock Photo; Choi: Al Bello/Getty Images; Arc de Triomphe: somchaij - stock.adobe.com; Louvre: Tomáš Nožina/Unsplash Fr

For the better part of twenty-five years, G&G contributing editor T. Edward Nickens and I have spent a good chunk of our phone conversations discussing our children, specifically about raising them outdoors. We both grew up exploring the woods and wa

In our Talk of the South newsletter, readers told us some of their pups’ top retrieves. A man’s bathing suit with keys in the pocket. Bill K. A skunk. This dog is fearless and apparently lacks a sense of smell. Michelle K. A tumbler half filled with

Covetousness is an ugly trait, but I couldn’t help the green fire kindling inside when my hunting pal Jimbo Robinson broke out a new Benelli Super Black Eagle 3 20-gauge in an Arkansas duck blind last fall. The shotgun appeared slender and winsome. S

Like any teenager, sometimes Grace Bowers needs a little space. She’ll jump in her Jeep Wrangler with George, her Goldendoodle, and blast Funkadelic while cruising Tennessee back roads. She has a thing for abandoned buildings, once finding a battered

■ “Crier,” the blistering opening track on American Aquarium’s new album, The Fear of Standing Still, displays the North Carolina band at its most anthe-mic, with front man BJ Barham blowing up toxic notions of masculinity. But after that blast of fi

Back in 2021, while on a book tour in North Carolina, the baker, cookbook author, and fifth-generation Tennessean Anne Byrn found herself stumped by an audience member’s query: “What makes Southern baking so special?” A softball, at first blush, yet

My earliest memory of a potluck is my father nudging me at a 1970s neighborhood get-together. He pointed at the punch bowl where a runny-nosed kid was fishing orange slices from a Sprite and sherbet mix, sucking the juice out, and tossing the peels b

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINK A centuries-old fermented beverage, usually made from pineapple, tepache has never been noted for its refinement. “Tepache not only causes drunkenness,” reported a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1917, “but its use

Long and skinny with glossy, blaze-red skin, the Jimmy Nardello looks like the type of pepper that would hang with habaneros on the spice scale. But this Italian heirloom is actually one of the easiest-eating, easiest-cooking peppers at the farmers’

Ashleigh Shanti could talk all day about the intricate regionalities of Southern food. The former Top Chef contestant ran the prestigious kitchen at Benne on Eagle in Asheville, where she explored Black Appalachian foodways, before recently opening G

Zak Walters ducks out from the kitchen of his Oklahoma City restaurant, Sedalia’s, to hand deliver three jewel-toned slabs of tuna to the front counter. Streaked with beautiful white fat, set atop crisp turnips and marinated radicchio, those sashimi

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORE When Beth Buccini sifts through her memories, often it’s the clothes that stand out most. The pink, sleeveless, ostrich-feather shift dress she wore to a fundraiser last night? Fabulous, she says.

In a sloping green bowl of earth in the Shenandoah Valley, Leigh Ann Beavers listens to the vibrating dawn chorus, her head still resting on her pillow. Above the roof of her clapboard German farmhouse in Raphine, Virginia, a raven and a red-tailed h

The family-run Charleston, South Carolina, shop Croghan’s Jewel Box curates one of the region’s widest, finest collections of antique and vintage jewelry. The allure lies in the pieces’ history and patina—subtleties new designs simply cannot replicat

In the entryway of Charlie Smith and Louise Alexander’s Greenville, South Carolina, home, a pink banquette tucks neatly into the corner. Against a bouncy lotus wallpaper and springy yellow trim, the newlyweds often meet there for lunch dates during t

The first night I brought Ernie home, he curled up on the pillow next to mine, defying physics with his compact roundness: from dog to perfect doughnut. I’d purchased a large training crate, as his foster mom had suggested, but couldn’t resist his sl

The first gift I remember my paternal grandmother giving me was a touch-me-not. I was not quite six when Grandma Mary held out the plant, potted in a Dixie cup, to me and stroked its tiny fernlike leaves. I gasped as the fronds folded in on themselve

There’s been a lot of hoopla recently about “eldest daughter syndrome.” The conversation about the burdens and expectations taken on by firstborn girls came to a simmer on the internet and within days boiled over into mainstream news. I noted the top

Growing up in Tampa, I learned through osmosis that Cuban sandwiches are, in a way, like afternoon thunderstorms—commonplace and also a vital means of renewal. Then I moved away and discovered that Cuban sandwiches elsewhere (I’m looking at you, Miam

On the one hand, it is silly to argue about which city is America’s sandwich capital. Like debates around other regional specialties—say, pizza or hot dogs—sandwich disputes end up offering more proof of how deeply these foods are stitched into our c

He’s been called a Sandwich King and the Dr. Frankenstein of sandwich making (and he also rocks a Duke’s tattoo), so when we asked Mason Hereford to mastermind the ultimate Southern sandwich for G&G, we had faith he would come up with something spect

TRY IT ON: grilled cheese Yield: 1½ cups At Papi Queso, his grilled cheese–focused sandwich shop in Charlotte, owner and executive chef Brian Stockholm stuffs the gooey sammies with all sorts of things, from smoked brisket to spaghetti. For what mig

Good sandwiches are feats of engineering and economy, which is another way of saying the tomatoes don’t slide out the back end and the tab doesn’t break the bank. Compared with dinners that unspool like novels, the best sandwiches, eaten on the fly,

As any bourbon lover knows, Kentuckians can work magic with wood and time. That’s how cooks in Daviess County and environs turned a nineteenth-century surplus of aging sheep (wool producers that were past their tender lamb stage) into one of the Sout

I had been carefully instructed: At Gusto, you shoot only the rise. You don’t track down the single bobwhite quail that rockets off on its own to land in a thicket a hundred yards away. You don’t go after the pairs and the triples and the busted cove

It’s a warm April night outside of Charlotte, and I’m sprawling on a blanket in a forest of camp chairs. Tie-dye abounds. So does plaid. A bubble machine is churning away valiantly near the stage, and every few minutes, a plume of illicit combustible

Every garden tells a story, but it always takes time to unfold. As a first-time homeowner, when I stood in my bare-bones yard in Charleston, South Carolina, flanked by patches of mulch and trimmed lawn, I longed for the sense of place I’ve witnessed

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOUL In 1978, when she was in her sixties, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West, the owner of Georgia’s third-largest barrier island, reluctantly sold it. But she was canny: She negotiated for herself a life estate, which

Butterfly pea flower tea at the Laurel Hotel’s 1856–Culinary Residence restaurant in Auburn, Alabama, arrives at the table a deep blue. But a pour of basil-and-sage-accented lemonade triggers a chemical reaction, and it suddenly swirls into a vibrant

When fans envision Eudora Welty, one of the titans of Mississippi literature, they might picture an elderly woman at a typewriter by the window of her house on Pinehurst Street in Jackson. “But she was so much more than that,” says Anthony Thaxton. O

To quote the Willie Nelson song, I woke up still not dead again today. Lying hot and heavy, but covered with fizz: a fine allover network of sweat beads, twinkling to the swash/tick of the overhead fan. I felt like meat loaf spiced with mint. Not lik

Someone once told the sixth-generation cattle rancher Jim Strickland a maxim that stuck with him: If you save the Florida panther, you save Florida. The endangered species, which represents the only breeding population of a big cat east of the Missis