The First Thing to Know About Garden & Gun Magazine

Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun had a very hot launch last year and shows an interest in quality editorial work, including photography. It's just a little hard to get past that name. Is it about hunting? Horticulture? Pistol duels? What the hell?

Helpfully, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains the name in a story today, saving us the embarrassment of ever having to ask about it ourselves:

"Publisher Rebecca Darwin admitted that she 'gulped' the first time she saw the proposed title. It was coined by the founding editor, John Wilson, who knew that Garden & Gun had been the name of a popular disco in Charleston.

"'It's a gutsy name,' Darwin said. 'But if we had called it something like The South Today, it would have been such a snore.'"

Comments

[erik]

Only in the south would you have such an ignorant, backwards, insensitive title for a magazine. As if people that care about guns (hunting & killing) give a damn about gardening, and vice versa. I guess Soldier of Farming or Martha Stewart's Hunting were already taken.

[C. Heston]

If it was some funky magazine, based on a funky bar in Charleston, somehow the name would work better. Something similar to Live Bait on 23rd Street. A dive bar; a dive magazine. But when it's upscale like that, it just screams "insensitive". But they wanted to stand out, so stand out they will. In the end, it's about how the advertisers feel about it.

[TN]

Sensitive to what? People who don't use guns to hunt? This country was built on the use of firearms used for daily existence. People who garden and use guns are the very backbone of this country. If you hate people who garden and use guns, go back to Europe or wherever you think it is better to live. All of America is not the inner city or the suburb. It is still, thankfully, mostly countryside, where people actually use the land they live on to continue their existence, and don't have an umbilical chord to the local Safeway or Vons.

[William Robert]

Erik, bless your pointy head...

Anyone living south of the Mason-Dixon line knows that you can only fit so many bodies of prissy Yankee boys under the porch. The garden is the next logical place.

[Erik]

TN - The country was also built on the backs of slaves. I guess that's still okay in the south too? Well I guess McCain is your man this year.

[pam]

Having worked all morning on a book about a garden (that has never seen a gun) this is gross. Sorry I can't come up with a better word - I think someone above already said stupid.

I would have voted for snores.

[lukebop]

rich white NRA southerners here.....such a fantasy of the OLD south, where everyone is happy and fashionable and aristocratic

[lukebop]

rich white NRA southerners here.....such a fantasy of the OLD south, where everyone is happy and fashionable and aristocratic

[Katherine]

What a hoot...Sign me up! I'm sick of the women's magazines that continually beat the same drum...make-up (we know how already), dieting (we know what's fattening), Hollywood (who cares!). This is something different to say the least.