Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER I recently found myself in Texas thanks to my son, Sam. He had qualified for the national Junior Olympic cross-country championships in College Station as a member of his team here in South Carolina, the Mt. Pleasant Track Club. And while travel days would fall during the school week (as well as crunch time for this issue of Garden & Gun), there was never any doubt we would make the trip. With a tight schedule, I knew any extracurricular fun would be limited, but my first text went to former G&G food editor and Texas superfan Jed Portman. Given we’d be arriving in Austin, his list ran deep, from Veracruz All Natural for breakfast tacos to a swim at Barton Springs. At the top of the list sat…

S. C. Gwynne WRITER When New England native S. C. Gwynne moved to Texas nearly thirty years ago, he’d never anticipated the warm welcome he would receive. “They’ve always accepted me here,” says the Austin-based author and historian, who penned “The Heart of Texas” (p. 109) for this issue. “I don’t know if I’m technically a Texan yet, but I feel very much a part of this place.” The former Time correspondent and editor has spent the last decade delving into the periods and populations that have altered modern history. The author of Empire of the Summer Moon, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about the Comanche tribe’s influence on the American West, Gwynne has also written tomes on topics such as the Civil War’s final year and how football’s passing game…

A BIRD IN HAND I’ve never been compelled to write in about a story until reading “Hope on the Wing” (December 2022/January 2023), which was as majestic as it was moving. The incredible paintings by Charly Palmer drew me in; Latria Graham’s magical writing had me spellbound; and Rodney Stotts’s beautiful life of purpose, struggle, grief, and passion moved me to tears. Emily Mellen Orange, Texas I am eighty-three years old and have passionately hunted ducks for three-quarters of a century. T. Edward Nickens’s story “The Ducks of Home” (October/November 2022) really resonated with me. Both of my grandfathers started me duck hunting on marshes at duck clubs they had started in the 1930s. I now hunt with my sons and grandsons and my seven-year-old chocolate Lab that I trained…

Patsy. Loretta. Dolly. Miranda. She probably wouldn’t put herself on that country music Mount Rushmore, but hear me out: Since blazing onto the scene with her hell-raising albums Kerosene and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Miranda Lambert has proved she has the old-school chops of Patsy Cline, the fire and grit of Loretta Lynn, and the buoyant effervescence of Dolly Parton. In 2015, the flames lowered into a slow burn—Lambert and fellow country star Blake Shelton divorced, and she retreated to a small Nashville studio where she wrote and recorded The Weight of These Wings, a double album on which Lambert was at her most vulnerable and anguished. She never publicly addressed the drama with Shelton, telling me in 2016: “If you wanna hear my side of the story, it’s all on there,…

It’s hard to picture today, as pleasure craft unhurriedly glide down the Potomac River, but by the 1790s, Alexandria, Virginia, reigned as one of the nation’s largest port cities. There, tall ships from the Iberian Peninsula, Great Britain, and the West Indies brought precious cargo, like molasses and rum, to the fledgling republic and loaded up in return wheat, rye, flour, and corn. To support its busy wharf, Alexandria became a center for wooden shipbuilding, an industry that thrived for the next hundred years. Today that past may seem relegated to a lone commemorative plaque on a pedestrian path along the city’s harbor. Unless, that is, your eye happens to drift to a curious red-timbered building floating on Old Town Alexandria’s waterfront, home base for a rare and unlikely community…

Don’t misunderstand: Bill Webb still loves a pointing dog. As a kid, he followed English pointers and setters through the longleaf pine and wire grass of his family’s farm near Rockingham, North Carolina. As an adult, he’s turned those same acres into the Webb Farm, a luxury quail lodge in the Sandhills region where he keeps a finely tuned kennel of classic bird dogs. But Webb has signed on completely to the English cocker spaniel craze. The dogs are brought to ground after a pointing breed pins down a covey of quail. While the pointer or setter stays staunch, the little cockers work dense cover close and fast to flush even the most recalcitrant of bobwhites. While it’s impossible to quantify just how popular flushing cockers have become, it’s clear…