Garden & Gun February/March 2020

By Charleston standards, I’m a newbie, especially when you consider the city was founded 350 years ago. I moved here from Manhattan a mere twelve years ago to join Garden & Gun shortly after its launch. The Lowcountry was not a foreign landscape to me, as I had grown up two hours south in Savannah, and its coastal environs had long beckoned me back. My landing couldn’t have been softer. My wife, Jenny, and I rented a carriage house that had been built in 1785, and on our first morning, we sat in the tiny courtyard and drank mimosas as the downtown church bells rang, amazed that the pendulum of life could swing so quickly from sitting in traffic jams on Broadway to watching carriage tours roll down our narrow…

Daniel Wallace WRITER AND ILLUSTRATOR “My strength as an illustrator is that, apparently, I’m incapable of embarrassment,” says the writer and amateur artist Daniel Wallace, who wrote and sketched “A Southern Family Portrait” (p. 30). There’s freedom in staying humble, Wallace says. “I kind of peaked in third grade—but if you are terrible at something and accept that fact, then you can just enjoy it.” Wallace has written six novels, including 1998’s Big Fish, which became an Oscar-nominated film. The director of the creative writing program at UNC–Chapel Hill, he is at work on a memoir. Latria Graham WRITER Each winter, Latria Graham nurtures a tableful of seedlings, sprouting Cherokee Purple tomatoes and okra, before planting outside. “We’ve got a bit of folklore around here,” the Spartanburg, South Carolina, writer says. “If it’s warm a…

SUNSHINE STATE OF MIND Everyone up North wants to escape the snow and the blustery cold and dip their toes in the warm tropical waters in Florida. And what better way to find out where to go than to read the December 2019/ January 2020 issue of Garden & Gun? Kay Worley via Facebook I have worried that my yearning for old-time Florida is a bit unhealthy. But it seems that others suffer the same as I do. In “Old Florida,” it was as if Rick Bragg grew up next door to me in my little town in Central Florida. I miss it every day. Anne Lineberger Charlotte, North Carolina GOING NUTS I travel to Missouri for work, and I have insisted to Missourians who claim Southern heritage, “If you haven’t been in Garden & Gun,…

WE ASKED... How do Southerners say, “I love you”? On Facebook and Instagram, readers shared their favorite ways to express L-O-V-E. If I’ve got a biscuit, you’ve got half. Shelby Zacharias “Watch for deer!” when driving home. Clinton Chambers When a Southerner roots you a favorite plant. Leslie P. Mills “I could eat you with a spoon.” @jancyreavis Cooking for others. The love is reciprocated by another washing the dishes. @littlewinghollow “Beer’s in the garage fridge.” Kelly George If a Southerner gives you a nickname, you’re loved. Joni Louque “J’eatyet?” Cynthia Perry Bourque My hubby grades the gravel driveway with his tractor. @twoangelsrus A handwritten card. @leahbfrazier Giving a little surprise surcee gift. Wanda Williams A bag of citrus from your tree. @bethanne_parra A bird-dog puppy. Elizabeth Abrams…

Alexander Smalls has crammed his corner apartment in Harlem with color—leopard-print cushions dot yellow couches, and jewel-colored drapes from his travels in Ghana sweep the floor—creating a warmth that matches the acclaimed chef and restaurateur’s welcome. As he enters his kitchen, dubbed his “laboratory,” to prepare something to eat, classical music at turns lulls and roars, apropos—his first act as a baritone earned him a Grammy and a Tony for a cast recording of Porgy and Bess. Smalls, a native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, traces both of those passions to his family’s roots there and in the Lowcountry, and the heritage coastal recipes he was raised on. As Smalls, now sixty-eight, traveled the world performing arias as a young man, he began taking culinary classes and eventually opened his own catering…

When Dallas natives Rae and David Liu left home for college (Columbia and Georgetown Universities, respectively), moving back wasn’t part of the ten-year plan—and the siblings had plans. Rae studied accessories design at the Fashion Institute of Technology and went to work for Alexander Wang as the designer’s accessories development manager. David ended up in senior management at Google in London. But with age and distance came perspective. “As we got older, we began to gravitate back toward home to be closer to family,” David says. The children of first-generation Americans who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan nearly forty years ago and founded a successful manufacturing company in Texas, Rae and David were raised on the American dream. “[Our parents] instilled in us a sense of determination, hard work,…