Garden & Gun

In 1986, architect Glenn Keyes opened his preservation-focused practice, Glenn Keyes Architects, in Charleston, South Carolina. Since then, Keyes and his team have been behind the preservation of some of the city’s most iconic buildings, from the Cha

Spend time in South Carolina’s Santee Delta with Phil Wilkinson, and you begin to wonder if his blood runs brown like the Santee River itself. A renowned wildlife biologist, Wilkinson, eighty-six, is a product of place, shaped not only by the element

After growing up along Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga and passing his college days on the Cumberland Plateau at the University of the South, Jon Meacham spent two decades as a writer and editor in Washington, D.C., and New York City. But like many S

THOMAS WOLFE, as was his wont, put it best. Toward the end of the posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again,the North Carolina–born novelist’s protagonist muses on memory and history. “I lived again through all times and weathers I had kno

Proud Larry’s is Oxford, Mississippi’s communal living room, where Ole Miss students mingle with professors, writers, and other assorted locals. A restaurant by day and music club by night, it has a warm vibe with a weathered wooden floor that’s prob

Since famously leaving a career in New York City to return to Kinston, North Carolina, near where her parents had raised tobacco and hogs, to open the restaurant Chef & the Farmer in 2006, Vivian Howard has dedicated herself to preserving the culinar

Over the course of a Chesapeake Bay waterman’s life, big memories tend to swallow smaller ones. So when seventy-two-year-old Harold “Stoney” Whitelock looks back on his childhood now, it’s all misty images of water and boats, and little else. “That’s

My grandmother’s house is the center of my pine tree galaxy. As a child, I spent every holiday in that place, surrounded by family, sharing food, and telling stories. Mary Emma Graham, my father’s mother, was the keeper of our secrets and our memorie

The South is an aggregate of many Souths: the Upland South, the Deep South, the Urban South, the Rural South, the vestiges of the Old South, the New South, the Newer New South, and so on. Then there’s what Bakari Sellers calls the “Forgotten South.”

Q We heard the Tryon Block House steeplechase is a tradition worth pursuing. Go for it? A You’ll have a helluva lot of good country fun with some fine horses if you do. Staged this year on April 11 in Columbus, North Carolina—as ever, by the Tryon R

Many Southern families have a go-to recipe for congealed salad, probably written on a yellowed index card in a grandmother’s impeccable handwriting. These salads, or their kin, tomato aspic, have been brought to special-occasion tables for at least t

Drinking vessels tell a story every bit as much as the drink they contain. An expert in antique drinkware once told me that he was offered up a ladleful from what his host described as a colonial-era punch bowl that had been lovingly handed down thro

Southern cooks barely tap into all the great eating that is swimming out there in our seas and streams. Atlantic bearded brotula, ribbonfish, and oyster drills rarely if ever make it to the supper table. “There isn’t a whole lot of seafood from South

he best way to reach Blackberry Farm’s master gardener, John Coykendall, is to call his wife’s cell phone. “Her business card says, ‘Keeper of the Seed Keeper,’ and that’s accurate,” he says. Seed Keeper is a title Coykendall has aspired to since chi

MAKERS: Sharon and Duane Little, of Little’s Boot Company LOCALE: San Antonio, Texas Lucien Little started his shoe shop in San Antonio in 1915, and before long he and his son Ben were making boots for ranchers and cowhands. Then a sort of artistic

Nestled between the Stono and Kiawah Rivers just thirty minutes from downtown Charleston, South Carolina, a new, self-sustaining community with a strong connection to nature is coming to life. Kiawah River, a 2,000-acre residential property on Johns

After the ferry ride from Fernandina Beach, Florida, and landfall on Cumberland Island, Georgia, and down the dirt road past the stately Greyfield Inn and beneath the live oaks and alongside the feral pony chomping on grass, the house rises from sand

There’s no telling how many road-trippers have exited I-95 near Wilson, North Carolina, and started in on a plate of chopped pork at Parker’s Barbecue without realizing their proximity to another Southern treasure: Boone’s Antiques. A mere half mile

I didn’t even want a dog. I was freshly back in Mississippi after a few years living abroad. Just a month earlier I had bought my first house, a nine-hundred-square-foot fixer-upper on a sagging street in downtown Hattiesburg, and I was feeling my wa

James Taylor is a hardworking man. In droll Instagram videos, he splits seemingly endless piles of logs into kindling for the woodstove in his studio in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. Already this year, he has celebrated the fiftieth annive

Long before she ever picked up a banjo, or won a Grammy, or received a MacArthur Fellowship, an eight-year-old named Rhiannon Giddens wanted to travel through time. She lived with her grandparents in rural North Carolina, where she liked to make up s

I’m hopeful and encouraged and excited by what I’ve seen,” says Ronald Kendall, a professor of environmental toxicology and head of the Wildlife Toxicology Laboratory at Texas Tech University. This may sound like a stretch for someone as preoccupied

The twelve-hundred-acre Wormsloe estate in Savannah, with its maritime oak and longleaf pine forests, has been held by nine generations of the same family since it was first established in the 1730s, as a plantation and an outpost to fend off Spanish

Just a handful of miles off the southernmost tip of the continental United States, the six Florida Keys reef lighthouses have guarded the world’s third-largest living coral reef since the nineteenth century. Once beacons for sailors, the lights have

Ten years ago, Cindy Ayers Elliott was no farmer. “I’d never grown anything in my life except for flowers, and even those were plastic,” she says with a laugh. Now the Mississippi native and former New York investment banker runs Foot Print Farms on

Wendell Berry has been called a prophet and a visionary, but he has about as much use for such lofty praise as he does for screens. He doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer. An essayist, fiction writer, poet, and small-farms advocate, Berry does pos

If you wonder why residents of Ocracoke Island began referring to vacationers as “dingbatters” around 1972, Walt Wolfram can help (the answer: thank All in the Family). He can explain why someone who grew up in North Carolina’s western mountains migh

New York book publishers don’t always do right by the South. Manhattan offices might love a version of the region, sure, because airy beach romances and Appalachian stereotypes sell. But if you’re looking for a publishing house that not only allows b

In 1990, Craig LeHoullier received a package at his home in Raleigh from Sevierville, Tennessee, containing seeds from an unnamed tomato plant with a fuzzy history. The sender, John D. Green, claimed the tomatoes would be thick, juicy, and a lush bol

Fawn Weaver had already real- ized her own life’s ambitions when she first learned about Nathan “Nearest” Green—or, as she tells it, when his story found her by way of a newspaper article. In the mid-1800s, Green, a formerly enslaved man, perfected t

Like many of us, Liz McCartney and Zack Rosenburg watched the gut-wrenching scenes from post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans feeling horrified and helpless. But unlike many of us, the couple uprooted their own lives to help. After an initial two-week s

When Franklin D. Vagnone coauthored Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums in 2015, he essentially tossed a small bomb into the staid, hands-off world of historic homes. Instead of keeping visitors behind a rope as they peered into a curated tab

The Gullah Geechee culture, long vulnerable to time and tide, has found many champions, including Benjamin “BJ” Dennis IV, Sallie Ann Robinson, and Amir Jamal Touré. Each of these experts descended from formerly enslaved Africans who lived on islands

Flint Theriot got the call in the wee hours of the morning last September 19: An elderly woman confined to a wheelchair was trapped in her Vidor, Texas, home, and the water was rising fast. Theriot, a thirty-one-year-old crane operator from Lake Char

The National Museum of African American Music will open this year in Nashville amid the glow of neon-lit honky-tonks. But given the African roots of country music, such as the introduction of the banjo, the placement makes sense. Music City, after al

Storms have marked Karen Amspacher’s family for more than a century. In 1899, hurricanes hounded her great-grandfather William Henry Guthrie off North Carolina’s Shackleford Banks. He floated his tiny home from the old Diamond City fishing village ne

In Hindman, Kentucky, one of the poorest areas in the eastern part of the state, and a community ravaged by opiate addiction, hope comes with strings attached—for guitars, mandolins, and dulcimers. That’s thanks to Doug Naselroad and Culture of Recov

During three combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rudy Reyes—a special forces recon U.S. Marine sergeant and elite combat diver—had executed countless amphibious insertions, jumped from helicopters into open ocean, and swum miles to shore in a heavy

Lauren Northup was sitting in her of- fice, on the second floor of an outbuilding of Charleston, South Carolina’s historic Nathaniel Russell House Museum, when a ray of sunshine beamed through a two-hundred-year-old window at her side and settled on

With only about 425 North Atlantic right whales left on the planet, the species faces a dire future. A combination of unprecedented mortality rates and poor calving seasons in recent years led many to predict right whales would be wiped out in a hand

Larry Callies wanted to be a cowboy for as long as he can remember. When he was three years old, his father put him on a horse for the first time, and once he learned to ride, the two began working for Sloan Williams, one of Texas’s largest rodeo sto

Dust-to-Digital, the Atlanta-based culture trove and record label founded in 1999 by Lance Ledbetter—his wife, April, joined him a few years later—reinvented the box set in 2003 when it released Goodbye, Babylon, six CDs of gospel songs and sermons,

Spurred by a report from Catherine Booker of the Exuma Foundation, Ted Dennard ventured to Great Exuma in the Bahamas in 2014 and confirmed a profound mystery: Despite the logwood, bougainvillea, and other nectar-producing plants, not a single honeyb

Brigette Jones wanted to find a career that combined her passions: talking and history. Never did she imagine, though, that she would become a tour guide at a plantation, or that her work uniform would be a Southern-belle gown. Yet after earning her

This is, like, the signaturebuilding in Madison, the signaturehome,” says Christine McCauley Watts, executive director of the Madison-Morgan Conservancy. In Madison, Georgia, a jewel of a town about sixty miles east of Atlanta, that’s no small boast.

It used to be the classic small-town story: “Growing up here, we spent our whole lives figuring out how to get out,” Cole Ellis says of Cleveland, Mississippi, a Delta hamlet twenty miles east of the Mississippi River. Now Ellis has become something

Even if my accent slightly drifted over my many years away in California, New York, New Jersey, and Italy, I always said “y’all.” Now, at home in North Carolina, it no longer provokes a smile. And once again, the cake is covered with icing, not frost

“I always know morel season is getting close when I start dreaming of mushrooms,” saysTomi Blom, who runs the Grand Lodge on Fifth event center in Paducah, Kentucky, and forages for edible plants for her chef friends in town. Morels generally appear

I’m bent over double in the courtyard, teasing, tweezing—easy now, firmly but care…fully… “Lizard? Got a lizard?” That’s Jimmy, bursting through the monkey grass. At last, his expression tells me, I may be into something that can animate a cat. “N

Demolished by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004 and abandoned for the next fourteen years to molder in the tropics, Walker’s Cay is coming back. Purchased in April 2018 by the Texas businessman and philanthropist Carl Allen, the one-hundred-acre

Every year, San Antonio shows its true colors at its Fiesta celebration (April 16–26), a festival honoring the many influences—Mexican, German, French, African, and indigenous peoples—that make the city such a rich cultural landscape. The tradition d