How We Recreated The First Southern Living Cover

Over fifty years and several hurricanes later, Southern Living returned to Mobile, Alabama, with two truckloads of azaleas.

The first issue of Southern Living appeared in February 1966. And this was the first cover, taken down in Mobile, Alabama, of a beautiful yard covered with azaleas . In February 2016, when the brand was celebrating its 50th anniversary, we thought, wouldn't it be a great idea if we could go down to Mobile to that very same yard and recreate the scene? I put out a post on my Grumpy Gardener Facebook page asking if anybody recognized this shot. I got lots of answers. We went down and searched, and we found the place.

And we did recreate the cover in this Mobile garden. Now, we did have a couple of problems in recreating this cover. For one thing, Hurricane Frederic happened down in Mobile. So at this place in this neighborhood, a lot of the big trees were smashed to pieces. Pieces are knocked over. Also, there wasn't one single azalea there. Normally azaleas are going to be in bloom in March, we had to photograph them in September or October. However, there's a new azalea type that was developed in Mobile called the Encore . And this azalea, not only does it bloom in spring, but it also blooms most heavily in the fall. We have a good relationship with the company called PDSI that came out with the Encore Azalea . They had a crew of about eight people hauling these things around. We had a copy of the cover photograph there, so we tried to recreate the look of it the best we could mixing in the colors the way they would have been used back then. That crew worked really really hard.

The homeowners were thrilled by the whole thing and I think everyone was really pleased with it. Now almost 60 years later we are still reflecting on that beautiful cover.

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