Deep Fried Kudzu

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!

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A reminder to stay out of the poison ivy this year and always; also, Alaina Varrone’s medieval beekeeper is beyondddd.

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From a visit to Paradise Gardens in 2009

Country Roads piece on folk art environments in Alabama

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Charles and Doe Signa III talk on Deep South Dining about Doe’s Eat Place (no more tamales in coffee cans!)

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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.

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At Gagosian:

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.

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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?

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The still new-ish Finding Edna Lewis documentary is on YouTube

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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

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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.

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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

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xoxo!

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

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

Lounge
Meridian MS, 2023.

Simmons-Wright Company
Kewanee MS, 2023.

Among my niche maps, this one for covered bridges in Alabama. It’s not complete, and I’m having some back-and-forth about whether cute 12′ pedestrian covered walkways in public parks and residential side-yards built to look like the ones you and I think of as *real* covered bridges should be isted…but yeah! This gets the really big, beautiful, impressive ones and includes some that are just fun to run across too. The map is embedded at the bottom of this post.

And always, if you know of one that belongs, let me know — thanks!

Some of the faves

The newest one I’ve been through, at Madison County Nature Preserve in Huntsville on Green Mountain, is post & beam and built in 1974. The park is a super easy walk and really pretty.

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This one in Waldo looks suspended in air

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The Swann in Blount County is 324′ long which makes it the longest historic one in the state. It was built in 1933.

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These are the supports for the nonextant Nectar Covered Bridge which was once the seventh-longest covered bridge in the country. It burned in 1993.

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The bridge I grew up going to — Clarkson – Legg Covered Bridge in Cullman County. It’s 270′ long:

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Horton Mill in Blount County is the highest covered bridge over water in the entire country

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And I’m so tickled that I actually know someone who built a covered bridge! This is Tat Bailey, who was among the ultra-talented friends I got to know from being in the incredible circle of Wade Wharton. While both of these gentlemen are gone now, I think about them and celebrate them still…and will forever.

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Holly & Smith, a Louisiana architecture firm, has been commissioned to “complete the historic building assessment and prepare design documents for the comprehensive restoration” of St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. When we were there last month, the front was closed off but here are some pics from previous visits:

and this digital twin SO interesting to watch of the Cathedral.

The restoration is expected to cost $45M, with Gayle Benson leading the fundraising effort. Work will begin this summer.

The campaign is $75M to allow for endowments.

Daily Mass can be watched online.

It is the oldest continuously-operated Catholic cathedral in the US. It was established in 1718.

Pics from a behind-the-scenes tour

These scaffolding pics are from a 2022 project:

Here’s the Cathedral in gingerbread, at the Sheraton in 2016:

The St Louis Cathedral “Our City, Our Cathedral” fundraising page is here.

Southern Accents
Cullman AL, 2023.

Before George Rodrigue painted the Blue Dog, he painted Aioli Dinner, dated 1971, of a group of people who met monthly at a different home each month. This one is set at the Darby House Plantation, and Rodrigue included some of his family members, including his grandfather and uncle. Wendy Rodrigue, George’s wife, wrote about the painting here.

What’s immediately apparent is that this is nothing like the later paintings of his (though a lot like the other paintings of his with people as subjects) in that the colors here are not vibrant. Once you focus on the subjects, you see that each man has a bottle of wine, there are some kids around and younger men who are doing the serving, and women in the back who prepared the meal. One of the older men is the one who made the aioli. These gatherings are part of the Creole Gourmet Societies that were most popular 1890-1920; the Trappey family tried to revive these gatherings back in the 1970s, but apparently they never regained their popularity.

This was a real club, so Rodrigue had photographs to go by. And almost every person in the painting is identified by name. For instance, the man closest at the head of the table is Leon Loze, and next to him to our left is Jean Courrege (the grandfather).

The artist later did variations on the painting, increasing the color and contrast. He loved this painting and always had it priced higher than other paintings in his Lafayette gallery because it took him so much time to paint — about six months — and because he knew it was especially important. In 2001, he even included Blue Dog in one of the Aioli Dinner paintings. He later gave the painting to his sons, who put it on loan to NOMA, and it’s today at the Ogden.

We Stand Together by George Rodrigue at the Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA:

Gravy and Biscuit Cancelled this Week
Baileyton Methodist Church, Baileyton AL, 2023.