Southern Accents
Cullman AL, 2023.
Trees Older than Bees
I’ve been reading How Flowers Made Our World (here on Bookshop, here on Amazon) by David George Haskill, a book that really has me thinking about magnolias.
Here’s what’s super fascinating: magnolias are so old that when they evolved, bees weren’t…
…Well, how to say this the right way? There weren’t bees yet.
Which, I realize this isn’t how the world works — not everything showed up at the same time — but imaginging a time before bees (and butterflies, and hummingbirds) is not the easiest thing.
So 95 million years ago or so, dinosaurs were strolling around magnolias.
What do magnolias do to be pollinated? Enter: beetles and flies. Those were the primary insect pollinators back then, so this helps explain things like how magnolias evolved to make things easy for them. The blooms are large and bowl-shaped (and thick so as not to be trampled by beetle legs crawling), and the blossoms smell great because beetles rely more on scent than sight.
While some trees started with wind pollination, the magnolia and its beautiful flowers stays with the beetle. And so incredibly interesting, the magnolia traps beetles (in a really nice way that they actually enjoy, because it’s so comfortable) overnight to ensure the beetle has the opportunity to do its job in the time it takes for the flower to go from its female to male stage. Depending on variety, magnolias do this different ways.
BTW, other chapters in the book discuss goatsbeard, orchids, grass, seagrass, rose, tea, and pansy.
This Week’s Various: May 22, 2026
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
The Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery was just named to the National Trust’s ‘America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2026’ list
above, from a 2009 visit
They say:
The building housed a wide set of iconic institutions, including the Majestic Café, the Malden Brothers Barber Shop, and the rooftop Afro Club, which hosted performers including Billie Holiday, B.B. King, Little Richard, and Tina Turner.
..Reuse ideas include a reopened Majestic Café and barber shop, community-serving office space, restored hotel rooms, and a revived Afro Club that would serve as a cultural venue. Rehabilitation of this scope will require a combination of public-private partnerships, historic tax credits, and philanthropic investment. Revitalization of the Ben Moore Hotel would illuminate the hotel as a symbol of African American perseverance and enterprise and allow for public interpretation focused on Black travel during Jim Crow, Green Book sites, African American entrepreneurship, and Montgomery’s broader Civil Rights landscape.
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On June 6 & 7, Crystal Bridges will celebrate the opening of an additional 114,000 square feet of artspace. The new space was also designed by Moshe Safdie. I’m SO looking forward to returning later this summer!
from a 2014 visit
This may be the last year of the 1919 Casamento’s in New Orleans
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I haven’t been out to see it yet, but Dezeen does a post on Trahan Architects, which completed the 4620 sqft Chapel of St Ignatius and the Gayle and Tom Benson Jesuit Center at Loyola University last year.
xoxo!
Catfish Culture
Southern Living ran a piece last week on legendary catfish cabins. One, I don’t know — Hagy’s Catfish Hotel in Shiloh TN — but the other two I know well: Ezell’s Fish Camp in Lavaca AL and Middendorf’s in Akers, Louisiana.
Ezell’s belongs — truly a fish camp, the way it has been forever. Incredible catfish and what tastes like my own great-grandmother’s coleslaw recipe, served in those ’70s salad bowls with good Lance crackers.
Middendorf’s fries those super thin filets of catfish, which is different and just so terrific.
And to add to my list, Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi. You really need to get there at opening, and it’s all pretty terrific, though the atmosphere is what really puts it over the top (which is what any of these places should be: atmosphere-heavy).
There are two places in the catfish pantheon that are gone but not forgotten:
Red’s Catfish Cabin in Cragford, Alabama
And Robert’s Catfish in Hartselle, Alabama, where they handed patrons a bag of feed to toss feed to the catfish in the pond after supper. As a kid, this was thrilling in such a sweet and goofy way.
A little iconography
The great Catfish Cabin sign in Athens AL
The Mike Shine Catfish mural in New Orleans
David Bates’ The Cat Man at the Memphis Brooks
This monument in Wintergreen Cemetery in Port Gibson, MS:
Fisherman 1992 by Frank Fleming at the Birmingham Airport
Softened by Time — Victorian Figural Reliefs in Alabama Cemeteries
Considering (mostly) Victorian-era figural bas relief cemetery monuments in Alabama cemeteries — although many of these may have come from northern sources, there were certainly some local marble cutters who specialized in this kind of very detailed work.
And for these examples, one can only imagine what they must have looked like closer to their carving. Following, some that come to mind (I’m actually going to do these figural ones in two parts over the next week or so, — leaving florals out for another time later on).
If you’d like a closer view, click on any of the images and use the magnifier tool in Flickr.
Enners Family, Riverside Cemetery, Demopolis AL
Old Cahawba, Alabama (above and below)
The Billingsley monument and cemetery gate, Marion AL:
The corresponding family gate is of Father Time — more on him in another post shortly.
Emma Herbert Monument in Pioneer Cemetery, Greenville AL:
George Cook monument in Pioneer. He and Emma above were married.
Athens City Cemetery, Athens, Alabama:
Greenwood Cemetery, Montgomery:
Old Cemetery, Dayton AL:
Not at all Victorian, this monument done in the same spirit with different material for Queen, at the Coon Dog Cemetery in Cherokee AL:
Vegetation Taking Over
Church
DeFuniak Springs FL, 2023.
This Week’s Various, May 15, 2026
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
A reminder to stay out of the poison ivy this year and always; also, Alaina Varrone’s medieval beekeeper is beyondddd.
From a visit to Paradise Gardens in 2009
Country Roads piece on folk art environments in Alabama
Charles and Doe Signa III talk on Deep South Dining about Doe’s Eat Place (no more tamales in coffee cans!)
from a visit in 2005
I missed this a year or so ago, but this statue, the US Senator LeRoy Percy memorial, Patriot, at the cemetery in Greenville, has been moved to the Mississippi Museum of Art. The sculpture was made by Malvina Hoffman, who studied with Rodin, and had been installed in 1930. It was commissioned by William Alexander Percy, who wrote the famous Lanterns on the Levee.
As of April 25, 2026, Donald Judd’s Ranch Office is open to the public for the first time as part of the Judd Foundation’s guided visit program in Marfa. In 1991, Judd purchased the former general store and renovated the ground floor to permanently house ten of his works—eight wall reliefs and two floor works—alongside maps and ranching equipment. The façade is inscribed with both the AdeC brand that Judd created for Ayala de Chinati, his ranch just beyond the Chinati Mountains, and the number 76, marking the year he purchased his first ranch, Casa Morales.
now nonextant: the Beverly Drive-In Theatre in Hattiesburg, from a visit in 2006 (just to take pics)
Please message me if you know: is it correct that there’s only one drive-in theater left in Mississippi, in Iuka?
The still new-ish Finding Edna Lewis documentary is on YouTube
Hunt Slonem’s Antebellum Pop! exhibit at the LSU Museum of Art in 2016 — my favorite exhibit that year
Hunt Slonem’s Catskills home is on the market
The A. Hays Town building beside the Hilliard Art Museum at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, from a 2023 visit
May 16-17, New Orleans Auction Gallery is presenting the estate sale of A. Hays Town.
Bagel at Potchke in Knoxville, from a 2022 visit
In the latest Oxford American, Borscht, Bialies, and Big Ears: A Jewish deli and a vanguard festival make beautiful music in an unlikely place
xoxo!
Seeing in Agam
In 1969, Yaacov Agam installed his 30′ square lenticular panel, Complex Vision. In 1976, it was installed on the UAB Callahan Eye Hospital, and restored in 2015.
UAB’s AEIVA mounted an exhibit, Yaacov Agam: Metamorphic with 30 of his works in 2016, the first time he’d had a one-man show in the city since the Birmingham Museum of Art had one for him in 1976, the same year the UAB work was installed, and the year he was named an Honorary Citizen of the state. There are also two Agam sculptures on the grounds of the BMA — Superline Volume (there at the entrance to the parking lot), and Touch Me (though I’m blanking on remembering where that one is installed).
In 2003, the Holocaust Memorial he designed was installed in New Orleans. It’s in Woldenberg Park right by the river, done as nine panels. When Temple Sinai’s Rabbi Cohn talked about the memorial, he said the idea was to remember the victims, not the killers. There’s a double rainbow included in the imagery.
In the Besthoff Sculpture Garden outside NOMA, there’s this Agam piece:
Last month, he received the Israel Prize for Visual Arts, for an incredible body of work. He’s elderly, so the award was brought to him at his museum in Rishon LeZion rather than him coming to Jerusalem for the honor. He said, “When I look around at my works, what I see is beyond the pieces themselves. I turn my head and see something different. Everything changes here. That’s the reality.”
That legacy is everything. As one of the great pioneers of kinetic art, he built an entire career around the idea that what we see depends entirely on where we stand and how we move. It’s perfect that his work is enjoyed at Callahan Eye Hospital, commissioned for the very patients who come there hoping to see better, in a building named for the physician who devoted his life to that same hope. xoxo
Southern Literary Gardens
from a visit a couple of years ago. loved.
Eudora Welty’s garden — really, that established so well by her mother, Chestina — was one she enjoyed tremendously, though not always keeping it up as thoroughly as her mother had. Chestina had put in a camellia “room” and planned a succession of bloom over the year.
Eudora’s night-blooming cereus was the topic of conversation (and twilight parties with notices in the paper), and even today there’s a cereus on the porch.
There’s an annual plant sale too. Here’s the link.
from a 2020 visit, though I didn’t get to tour the home
Flannery O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia was where she lived from 1951-1964 and is on the National Register. Called “Andalusia”. We’re not really thinking about a garden so much as the grounds — the peacocks are still there, and the home is open as a museum.
My favorite Flannery quote ever, ever: “when in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”
Then there’s Caroline Dormon, who as Country Roads put it:
A Louisiana legend, Dormon’s interests and expertise spanned forestry, botany, horticulture, conservation, ornithology, archaeology, ethnology, literature, art, education, and preservation, all fueled by an unassuming yet steadfast passion for all things wild. Born in 1888 at her family’s summer estate near Saline, Louisiana—called “Briarwood”—Dormon came of age at a time when women were largely absent from the fields in which she would thrive. She was a Renaissance woman, an intellectual ahead of her time who kept up a relentless pace to safeguard her corner of the world and all its natural beauty.
Briarwood is 212 acres, including the Bay Garden, the world’s most historic collection of Louisiana irises. It’s open to the public every weekend in March, April, May, October, and November.
from a 2024 visit
Of course I have to mention Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home in Oxford. People aren’t coming here for the garden necessarily, but there’s definitely something to the grounds. Eastern red cedar trees line the walkway from the road to the house, and these are significant because they were planted after yellow fever swept through the South. Those trees were thought to purify the air.
Faulkner did draw up and put in a maze garden with English tea roses and privet, plus there’s 29 acres of forest with a trail that goes from Rowan Oak to Ole Miss.
The museum keeps things especially old-school, with admission at $5 cash only.
Cocktails
Lounge
Meridian MS, 2023.
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