Garden & Gun December/January 2021

When it comes to training gundogs, few are aspassionate—ormeticulous—as Zachary Kellerman. The founder of CedarOak Kennels in Southern Illinois,Kellermanhas devoted his career to the art of training, from his beginnings in the obedience world to running a multifaceted kennel with breeding services and a signature method. “I find a real joy in it,” he says. “When you teach dogs how to learn, you can train them in anything.” At CedarOak Kennels, Kellerman uses balanced training (a mix of obedience and traditional English techniques) to take dogs from puppies to field ready in a matter of months. While the kennel trains all breeds and skill levels, importing British Labradors to breed is a central element of the business. “The genetics we deal with are of such a high caliber,” Kellerman says of…

Meet Dylian (top), a Chesapeake Bay retriever from El Paso, Texas, and the overall winner of the 2020 Good Dog Photo Contest as chosen by G&Geditors. “He gets this big, crazy grin on his face when he’s jumping into water,” says his owner Una Daggett, who snapped the photo on a GoPro, narrowly avoiding a collision with ninety pounds of wet dog. Thank you to our readers for the nearly twelve thousand submissions and one million votes, and for helping us celebrate the many, many good dogs in the South and beyond. To see more editors’ picks and the readers’ choice winner—a blind bluetick coonhound (bottom left) from Mobile who garnered the support of the city mayor himself—visit gardenandgun .com/gooddog2020. GARDENANDGUN.COM Una Daggett; Susan Lucas; Chelsea Chin; Jenn Greene…

On August 28, the Garden & Gun family lost a legend. Julia Evans Reed passed away from cancer at age fifty-nine. Her writing was a cornerstone of G&G for more than a decade, and her voice in the pages will be irreplaceable. She could frustrate any editor (including me) with her penchant for filing stories at the last possible minute, but those stories were always worth the wait. As her friend the historian Jon Meacham writes in his tribute to her on page 106, “If we’d tried to invent a character like Julia, nobody would have believed it. She was a tsunami of talent, charm, and energy. She could write about anything and make it sing. Her distinctive voice was at once affectionate and arch—a tough combination to pull off.” As…

I often hear from readers that they feel like they’re part of the G&Gextended family, a wildly entertaining and thoughtful bunch that includes musicians, chefs, artists, and others from our pages. To see many of these talents live, be sure to check us out on Instagram (@gardenandgun), where on any given day Alexander Smalls (above) might be whipping up his spin on potato salad, or Brothers Osborne might be playing a private show. It’s like watching the magazine come to life. Left to right: Maggie Braucher; Hermes Hamanot…

Michael Witte ILLUSTRATOR For Michael Witte, drawing Julia Reed was easy; no matter how eccentric he made the scene, it couldn’t be too far off from the writer’s larger-than-life personality. “She was truly her own character,” says Witte, who had illustrated Reed’s column, the High & the Low, since 2011. Now based in New York, where he has sketched for the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone, Witte grew up on a farm outside of St. Louis. “I’ve always felt connected to Julia’s work, especially to the extent it explored the rural nature of the South,” he says. In this issue, Witte bids farewell to Reed with a final watercolor homage (p. 106). Aimee Nezhukumatathil WRITER “My not-so-dirty little secret is that I read more about nature and science than I do about literature—and I’m…

COVER MODEL The recent cover for the Best of the Sporting South issue (October/November 2020) takes my breath away. While I love the idea of your Good Dog Photo Contest for my own trio of Irish wolfhounds, I have never seen a more magnificent photo of a dog than that of Chesa, the German shorthaired pointer. Her stance shows every muscle and curve of her beautiful conformation, and her head and softly veined ears are perfect. She may perform wonderfully as a bird dog, but she is an exquisite specimen of man’s best friend. Chesa’s cover photo is a grand champion winner. Katrina Neylon Old Hickory, Tennessee The German shorthaired pointer on the cover is beautiful, although I can’t exclaim this in front of my border collie mix. Denise Holt Mount Juliet, Tennessee Your cover does a…