CJ Lotz Diego is a deputy editor at Garden & Gun in Charleston, South Carolina, a Southern lifestyle magazine that reaches more than 2 million readers in print and online. She joined the magazine in 2013 and writes about gardens, homes, art, food, books, history, and culture across the Southern United States and beyond. She also edits the magazine’s Due South travel section. CJ grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and studied journalism at Indiana University in Bloomington. In Charleston, you can find her in the downtown pocket garden she grows with her florist husband, Max, or mudlarking, her hobby of looking for everything from broken pottery to shark’s teeth in the Lowcountry’s ancient tidal creeks.