3 Alabama experiences earn spots on Garden and Gun’s 2025 bucket list

If you’ve still got a couple openings on your 2025 bucket list, Garden and Gun has a few suggestions, and you won’t even have to leave the state to mark ‘em off.

Garden and Gun recently released a 2025 bucket list of 50 must-do activities throughout the South, and three of them take place in Alabama.

The three Alabama experiences the magazine mentioned were the blooming of the Cahaba lilies during the spring; the Airing of the Quilts Festival in Gee’s Bend in October, and a visit to the Legacy Sites in Montgomery.

Cahaba lilies bloom from May into June in the Cahaba River and every year, visitors can take a canoe trip out to see the star-shaped flowers during the Cahaba Lily Festival in West Blocton, which is slated for May 17 this year. They are also visible from hiking trails within the Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge.

Gee’s Bend, Ala., has become well-known for its quilts, and at the Airing of the Quilts Festival on Oct. 4 at the Gee’s Bend Welcome Center, visitors can meet participating quilters as well as view their colorful work on full display.

READ MORE: Alabama small towns to explore this year

The Legacy Museum connects the history of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery until the Civil War, lynching as a tool of racial terror to subordinate Black citizens, and mass incarceration in the 21st Century. The museum is part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s projects that are bringing tourists, hotels, restaurants and jobs to Montgomery.(Mike Cason/[email protected])

The Legacy Sites are open year-round in Montgomery and consist of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, National Memorial for Peace and Justice as well as the Legacy Museum, which the magazine said “represent arguably the nation’s most immersive and affecting reckoning with its racist history.”

Other items outside Alabama featured on the list include visiting Austin’s honky tonks, exploring the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, dining at the historic Mayflower Cafe in Mississippi and more.

You can read the full bucket list on Garden and Gun’s website.