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.

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. 

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. 

"Mobile swiftly becomes my new favourite US city." 

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. 

This is an excerpt from a TOAST Magazine (UK) article. You can read it in its entirety here.