Briefly Noted: The Southern Lifestyle Will Rise Again

Katherine Mangu-Ward from the July 2009 issue

Garden & Gun is not a practical, down-home magazine with ads for handguns and advice columns on coaxing that stubborn rhododendron to bloom. The Charleston-based magazine, founded in 2007 by a former publisher of The New Yorker, is a chic Southern lifestyle magazine devoted to seeking out the best handcrafted boots, skillet cornbread, and quail lodges.

Inside, you’ll find stories like the tale of a displaced Southerner so homesick for sweet tea that she got a tattoo devoted to “the real hillbilly heroin.” But because this story is in Garden & Gun, the tattoo is understated and done in a hip letterpress font. “Now that I have moved home,” she writes, “it serves less as a touchstone and more as a drink order.” The narrative tone blends self-conscious folksiness with a Southern patrician drawl and meshes surprisingly well with the slick photography and layout. With a little luck, Garden & Gun will do for hillbilly what Wired did for geek.