Matt Collins, writer and Head Gardener at the Garden Museum, ponders brotherhood, native wildlife, and the vastness of America as he journeys through the southern states.
Smokey Mountains, Tennessee
“Give me one sec,” says my brother, his voice in surround stereo through the car speakers, his tone bearing the clipped stability of an operator’s “hold the line, please”. In the stillness of bumper to bumper Tennessee traffic, the tarmac outside cooking in the 100-Fahrenheit afternoon, I glance around: at the thick forest to my right and the solitary chestnut barn to the left. “You could stop at the town of Lebanon, about half an hour from Nashville airport – there’s a coffee place called ‘Roasted Coconut’, put it into maps when you get a sec.”
“Is it a nice town?” I ask, deliberating.
“Yeah, looks OK; red brick centre, bit of history. A burrito place you’ll love. You’ve got plenty of time.”
My brother, Tom, is at home, back from last week’s two-thousand-mile road trip together through the American South, and despite being swamped just now in the familial and occupational responsibilities that awaited his return, he makes time to provide navigation advice from across the Atlantic. I take it as given that he’s already looked up the status of my flight home this evening. After hanging up, I check the time, weigh options, and search up ‘Roasted Coconut Lebanon’.
This is the dynamic I miss during the four solo days that follow our week together: the elder brother’s confident, measured decision-making; my somewhat overambitious, ever-uncertain yet generally positive approach to travel. But also our shared appreciation of the detour, a shared humour, and a pretty well-aligned, often silent reading of passing places and people. After eleven states, three time zones and eight days in close company – sharing hotel rooms, long drives, car boot lunches and sweaty hikes – I’d dropped Tom at the departures pull-in at Atlanta airport, Georgia, and carried on alone up through the blue hills of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, swapping the humid South for a cooler mountain air. Crossing interior Tennessee, today – a long haul through the middle – is the final leg of mammoth mileage.
In recent years, this dynamic, as brothers, has been ironed and refined on trips through America in particular. Leading busy, separate lives, the US seems to suit us well as an arena for companionable travel: the openness of the landscape and the familiar-yet-unfamiliar setting combine a relative ease of movement with a rolling succession of mutual discoveries. It is at once a country of definable yet endlessly shifting character, and the drama of its landscapes is forever compelling, irrespective of the political climate. Though it’s a certain cliche, our incentives for US travel meet on the road; or, at least, in covering great distances. For me, as a gardener, this facilitates a delve into the country’s rich native flora; for Tom, the opportunity to visit and stitch together disparate places of long-held interest. Together, we’ve meandered the sandy Southwest and the leafy Midwest, and taken a sleeper train down through the Great Plains, stamping states like squares on a bingo card, endeavouring to collect them all. This most recent trip adds seven new states for Tom; eight if you count the stop in Denver before our connecting flight down to Texas, which I don’t.
“You can’t include Colorado if you didn’t leave the airport,” I reiterate with childish provocation, as we set off from Fort Worth in the enormous hire car Tom had picked out for us.
“But I stood outside!” he protests, half serious.
“On the airport terrace!”
“That still counts…”
Osage County, Oklahoma
At the Dry Hollow Bar in pretty Pawhuska, northern Oklahoma – a smart offering along the small town’s moneyed ‘Old West’ high street – Tom is in conversation with a local nurse, sat to his left, and her friend comes to join us. The friend’s husband is standing close by and, concerned he might get the wrong idea, I get down from the bar and make friends. But I quickly find my bumbling Englishman act unnecessary: he’s convivial and warm, and we’re soon discussing Oklahoma life, its history, its historic tornadoes and – ever my favoured US subject – prairie rattlesnakes.
Pawhuska being situated on the edge of the largest remnant prairie in the country, you just know everybody here has a snake story. He points out a snakeskin hanging on the wall in the bar, casting a finger across a room now bustling with cowboy hats and evening dresses, to a corner cluttered with artefacts. So we go over and pay our respects to this great predator of the prairies. While he’s describing his most recent ‘rattler’ encounter, finding them often beside the oil derricks he checks on for work, I peek over at Tom for signs he’s ready to exit. We’re off into the vast grasslands tomorrow morning; to be engulfed in the flowering Oklahoma prairie.
“You’ll be blown away,” beams the nurse, “all that distance. And the breeze through the grass; it’s my favourite place in the world.”
Coffeyville, Kansas
The joke here is that we’ve pulled into town looking for coffee, but there isn’t any – the first shop boarded up, the second misleading.
“Oh, gosh, no, sorry we don’t. Have you tried Scooter’s?” offers the till attendant at ‘Colonel Coffey’s Trading Post’, a kind of giant indoor flea market that, according to Google Maps, also serves coffee (though I now spot the grammatical deception). “Where are you guys visiting from?” she promptly asks.
“London,” I reply, which is always what I say, even though it’s no longer strictly true.
“Gosh,” again, “well, welcome to Kansas!”
We make a cursory circuit of the enormous room and its maze-like aisles, passing lot after lot of personal knick-knacks for sale – lamps, books, rugs, race car memorabilia; vintage signs pulled from storefronts and billboards – but the scale of the place is overwhelming. We give up on the fleeting prospect of securing holiday gifts, give up on coffee, and jump back in the car, setting a new pin for the Ozarks, Missouri. But Kansas, it turns out, isn’t what one pictures – the rolling emptiness and reddened horizon; the rural crossroads and remote ranches. It was all these things when Tom and I took a train across its centre six years ago, but today, driving the Kansas-Oklahoma borderlands, we pass oakwood-encircled villages, cross narrow and winding creeks, and follow tracks lined with the fat nodding heads of pink echinacea flowers.
Little Rock, Arkansas
Arkansas, too, is not what I’d pictured. At all. The Ozark route, which was Tom’s suggestion, takes us through broadleaf forests to rival those of Appalachia – deep tracts you wind down into while moving south towards the state capital of Little Rock. The colours in autumn must be spectacular. At the forest margin, I spot a large black swallowtail butterfly feeding on knapweed blooms, its coloured glasswork underwing mesmerising as I fumble with my camera. Further south in the direction of Louisiana, following our short stay in Little Rock, the landscape changes outright with a contrasting emptiness: humid, looming trees edge the freeway; along the central reservation, a great swathe of ink-blotched yellow coreopsis flowers.
Little Rock was always our intended moment of pause on this trip, which, in its entirety, would form something like an ‘N’ shape, going north to the prairies, southeast to Alabama and north again for the eastern mountains. Sitting in the Hillcrest Little Bakery – a meet point for locals of the upmarket Hillcrest neighbourhood – we take an unusually leisurely time with our coffee and breakfast burritos. On trips like these we’re typically in a rush, eager to cram a weekend’s itinerary into eight hours. Instead, it is late morning by the time we venture to the city’s downtown, having taken time to round off a conversation that, much like those on the road, ranged from the earnest to the idiotic: the pandemic lockdowns, getting older and the challenges of our church-going youth; the appropriate attire for hotel breakfasts and how, visually, America’s wild turkey is an evolutionary mess.
Little Rock is bright and hot, so to the Clinton Library first for nineties nostalgia (can you have too many portraits of Bill with a saxophone?) and then beneath the cover of the city’s river market, browsing stalls of heirloom ‘Arkansas’ tomatoes, woodcraft and trinkets. Afterwards we wander the old bridges crossing the Arkansas, stopping at the ‘little rock’ itself, a fragment of sandstone retained from the original outcrop observed by French explorers coming along the river in the early 1700s. Later, I persuade Tom into an indoor workout at our Airbnb – two men straddling forty, jumping to a YouTube video in someone’s lounge – which we conclude with a run through Hillcrest’s lush 100-acre park.
Vicksburg, Mississippi
After a long drive south through Arkansas and Louisiana, and following two failed, over-eager attempts to pull up beside the wide Mississippi River (each time mistaking amputated lakes for the river itself), we find ourselves on the eastern Mississippi bank, high on the bluff of historic Vicksburg, looking out across the streaming, muddied water, all forest-fringed and swampy. We crossed the Mississippi years before, up in Illinois, but not this close nor with this extent of view. The surge this far south is almost unnerving in its expanse: a great sweep of unstoppable movement.
At the Lower Mississippi River Museum nearby we absorb the river’s commercial and social history, and explore the old decommissioned Mississippi IV tugboat permanently rested there, its great steel hulk and its multiple deckhouses giving the impression of a boat built for the sea, so vast is the river it was intended to serve.
Mobile, Alabama
Onward to Mobile, and within a day we’re out on the Tensaw River Delta in a two-person kayak (having not shared one of these since childhood holidays in Wales), scouting for alligators. Every smooth rock and every long, semi-submerged log gets scrutinised. Travelling so deep within the South, I had more or less guaranteed Tom some ’gators on this trip, but despite our best efforts, paddling out into Mobile Bay from Meaher State Park, none surface. We’re turning pink in the midday Alabaman sun, so to ‘Felix's Fish Camp’ we go – one of those glorious wooden shacks on stilts in the catfish silt that serves ‘heartland southern’: shrimp n’ grits, crab and crawfish, buttered greens and fresh catch. Positioned out on a causeway, with narrow panoramic windows, the restaurant acts as a wildlife hide: from our table we watch a large bird drop to the water, clasp, and sluggishly lift off again with a fish. There’s a silence, into which I read Tom’s disappointment about the alligators, but it’s soon broken when he ponders, “are crabs inherently creamy?” We laugh at the ridiculousness of the question. “Seriously, how are they so creamy?”
“I think it’s the added cream.”
Afterwards, I console him with a visit to the USS Alabama Memorial Park, which, besides the warship and accompanying submarine, is brimming with military planes – Tom’s great love since childhood. Invariably, there’s an air museum stop-off on all our US trips. In the late afternoon we make for the quiet of Bellingrath Gardens, and for a swim in the warm gulf off Dauphin Island. Our evenings in Mobile are spent on Dauphin Street, where music spills from doorways and every other glass frontage is a beckoning restaurant or bar. Between the cuisine, the deco architecture and the avenues of broad, moss-dripping live oaks, Mobile swiftly becomes my new favourite US city.
Atlanta, Georgia
On the road to Montgomery we make an Alabama detour to a large area of pine forest-dwelling flowers I’d long wanted to experience. Eyeing the storm clouds rolling in above us and flashes of lightning brightening the tree trunks, Tom is back at the car well before I jump in, soaked from head to toe – laughably bedraggled, drenched with rain and sweat. We then carry on up to the state capital. Once the capital, too, of America’s Civil Rights movement, bold and buzzing downtown Montgomery presents itself as an immersive history lesson, with signposts at almost every corner detailing Rosa Parks’ arrest and the subsequent 1955 bus boycott, and, going further back, the anguishes of the slave and associated cotton trades. Though limited to an overnight stop, we walk the lit-up Riverfront Park at night and the historic centre by day, visiting the Rosa Parks Museum and refuelling at Alabama’s favoured spot, Prevail Coffee.
Then into Georgia to drop Tom off at the Atlanta airport. Owing to the infamous tangle of seven-lane highways surrounding the country’s busiest international hub, this is an inevitable scramble of indicators and hazards, a heaving of bags and a swift air high-five through the car window; then a sudden silence behind the wheel. An hour later, still navigating my way out of the concrete city limits, Tom calls from his boarding gate, wanting to check that I'm managing the massive car alright, and safely on my way to Asheville, ever the older brother.
“I’m still in Atlanta, I think…”
“Right, what’s happened there then?”
Asheville, North Carolina
Of all the American cities to experience alone, Asheville would probably top the list. For me, few other small cities have felt so immediately genial, or as inherently communal as this municipality in the mountains. Coming in off the narrow, shaky Appalachian roads, which at one point have me utterly turned around (though repeatedly spellbound by the Blue Ridge, which probably contributes to the disorientation), I wander a compact downtown of relaxed cafes, craft breweries (Asheville’s signature ingredient), artfully curated bookstores and eccentric hikewear outlets. The city bustles like a tourist town yet remains pleasantly ‘un-touristy’, and the common uniform is one of plaid and hemp.
Over a quiet American IPA, sat in the shade of a brewery awning, I write up the past few days’ travel notes, including an afternoon’s hang with an old home friend turned Asheville poet, a drive up to Roan Mountain (the hillsides and forests there still in the process of being made safe following the devastation of last year’s hurricane Helene); a visit to the grand Biltmore garden outside town and another 400 or so road miles. In all, this trip has once again made America feel bigger and more impossibly expansive in my mind. Tracing the route on a condensed USA map, back home, the southeastern corner it occupies pales in significance to the country’s vast whole, with still so much country untouched in between. It’s a shame Tom missed out on the mountains, I reflect. Nonetheless, the bigger, wider Texan, Oklahoman and southern roads we shared feel more in keeping with our particular consumption of this country and our dual sensibility: open space in which to think, talk and not talk, and spread-apart cities to visit like islands in a limitless sea – those routes are the more intoxicating to follow.
Back in Little Rock, Tom had made a comment that some years ago might have seemed immaterial, but now as older men – fast approaching middle age – feels oddly affecting. “I sometimes forget that we had the same upbringing,” he had said, as we walked over an Arkansas river bridge in the midday heat; “it’s reassuring – our similarities, and the things we dwell on.” I hadn’t considered this before, but found I could agree. The older you get, and the more distanced from your roots, the more reassuring, and significant, the shared upbringing becomes. In the still, sticky air in the heart of the South, he added, “…we even sweat the same.”
Words and photography by Matt Collins.
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