{"id":838756,"date":"2025-04-03T16:12:24","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T21:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/how-an-american-radical-reinvented-back-yard-gardening\/"},"modified":"2025-04-03T16:12:24","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T21:12:24","slug":"how-an-american-radical-reinvented-back-yard-gardening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/03\/how-an-american-radical-reinvented-back-yard-gardening\/","title":{"rendered":"How an American Radical Reinvented Back-Yard Gardening"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you haven\u2019t heard of Ruth Stout, you haven\u2019t spent much time in the Home and Garden section of a bookstore lately, and you haven\u2019t been listening to gardening or homesteading podcasts, either. Stout, who died nearly half a century ago, lived most of her life in the shadow of her far more famous brother, the writer Rex Stout, the creator of the fictional detective Nero Wolfe. Alexander Woollcott, who for years wrote this magazine\u2019s Shouts & Murmurs column, was convinced that he was the inspiration for Wolfe\u2014like Wolfe, he was famously fat\u2014and even took to calling himself Nero. \u201cIt was useless for Stout to protest,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em> reported in a Profile of Stout in 1949. \u201cNothing could convince Woollcott that he had not been plagiarized bodily.\u201d Nero Wolfe, who is loath to set foot outside his brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, is obsessed with orchids and dedicates four hours a day to tending to them in his plant rooms on the roof. (Too big to climb stairs, he rides an elevator.) Aside from that, he has nothing to do with gardening. These days, most Nero Wolfe books are out of print and Rex Stout is largely forgotten\u2014if not by his loyal fan club, the Wolfe Pack\u2014but a whole lot of people are talking about his sister.<\/p>\n

Ruth Stout\u2019s three biggest books, \u201cHow to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back<\/a>\u201d (1955), \u201cGardening Without Work<\/a>\u201d (1961), and \u201cThe Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book<\/a>\u201d (1971), have all been reissued in the past few years. What\u2019s known as the Ruth Stout Method\u2014\u201cI never plow or spade or cultivate or weed or hoe or use a fertilizer or use a poison spray or use a compost pile, or water\u201d\u2014is an inevitable subject on podcasts like \u201cThe Beet,\u201d \u201cFarmish Kind of Life,\u201d \u201cThe Daily Farmer,\u201d \u201cMaritime Gardening,\u201d and \u201cShe Said Homestead.\u201d Stout is the bee\u2019s knees, the goddess of soil, the doyenne of dirt. She\u2019s all over YouTube and X (#RuthStoutMethod) and Instagram (#legend). There are millions of posts about her on TikTok alone, from weekend gardeners and trad wives<\/a>, organic farmers and Carhartted homesteaders. In selfie videos of straw-hatted gardeners harvesting blue-ribbon pumpkins and the plumpest of potatoes, the Ruth Stout Method has been put to the music of everyone from Iggy Pop to Mama Cass. There are, of course, haters\u2014\u201cMY RUTH STOUT GARDEN FAILED<\/em>\u201d and \u201cNo More Ruth Stout\u201d\u2014but there are many more lovers: \u201cHow to Use the Ruth Stout Method to Get Amazing Results\u201d and \u201cRuth Stout is the best!\u201d There are even tribute<\/em> videos. She is the Beyonc\u00e9 of the back yard.<\/p>\n

Rex Stout, who was the head of the Authors Guild, wrote fifty-two novels. (\u201cI don\u2019t know how many times I have reread the Nero Wolfe stories, but plenty,\u201d P.\u00a0G. Wodehouse<\/a> once confessed. Me, too.) His books were translated into twenty-six languages. They sold more than a hundred million copies. Between 1965 and 1975, according to his biographer, \u201che had more books in print than any other living American writer had.\u201d<\/p>\n

His sister was proud of him, but her spirit of sibling rivalry was something fierce. Not only because of his fame but also because of his name, he was known as the \u201cdetective-story king\u201d; she became the \u201cmulch queen.\u201d When it was hinted that Rex, a noted child prodigy, had read the Bible by the age of two or the Iliad in the original Greek before he was born, Ruth would point out that she\u2019d read everything Rex had, only she had read it first. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be remembered as Rex Stout\u2019s sister,\u201d she said. \u201cI want him to be remembered as Ruth Stout\u2019s brother.\u201d She\u2019s gotten her wish. At long last, she\u2019s having her day in the sun. She didn\u2019t plow and she didn\u2019t dig. She didn\u2019t use fertilizers or pesticides. She never watered or weeded. Not for nothing did she call her method \u201cno-work gardening.\u201d She didn\u2019t really believe in work. No tilling, no hoeing. No buying, no selling. What\u2019s wild is how little about her truly radical life is generally known. She was, for a very long time, a Communist. Gardeners of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shovels!<\/p>\n

Much of what I know about Ruth Stout I know from reading her seven-hundred-page unpublished autobiography, which she seems to have written sometime in the nineteen-sixties. I found it in the files of an English professor named John McAleer, who published a biography of Rex Stout in 1977; Ruth was his chief informant. He sent her questionnaire after questionnaire.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas Rex the family pet?\u201d he asked her.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d she wrote back.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did your mother react to Rex\u2019s success as a writer?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she would have preferred it if he hadn\u2019t written about murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

But she also bridled at McAleer\u2019s endless questions. She once wrote a book called \u201cIt\u2019s a Woman\u2019s World,\u201d but she knew it wasn\u2019t. She decided to use the occasion of her correspondence with her brother\u2019s biographer to tell him a great deal about her<\/em> life. And then: she sent him the manuscript of her autobiography. \u201cI\u2019m mailing the ms. today & forget that promise to return it in 48 hours,\u201d she wrote him. \u201cI\u2019m in no hurry for it. I sort of ran thro it & was a little surprised at how dull it is.\u201d He never sent it back. It wasn\u2019t dull.<\/p>\n

Ruth Imogen Stout was born in Girard, Kansas, on June 14, 1884, the fifth of nine children. Rex, who arrived two years later, was the sixth. They grew up on a farm, though they didn\u2019t so much help out on the farm as just live on it. They picked strawberries. They were intense competitors, especially in croquet. She once told this story: \u201cWhen I was a girl, I took out a book, the title of which was \u2018Will Power,\u2019 from the library. When my mother saw me reading it, she said, \u2018Oh, Ruth! Do you really think you need more will power?\u2019\u00a0\u201d The family moved to the city\u2014Topeka\u2014when Ruth was twelve and Rex was ten. Ruth left Topeka around 1903. In 1909, the year she turned twenty-five, she followed Rex to New York. She tried her hand at fiction. During the war, she lost her job (she\u2019d been working as a bookkeeper), and, \u201cwith $117.00 in my pocket-book, without a job and with Rex\u2019s typewriter sitting idle,\u201d she writes, \u201cI decided this was probably as good a time as any to find out if I was a writer.\u201d She had success in the pulps, with O.\u00a0Henry-style stories like \u201cJust Hungry,\u201d from 1917, about a girl from Kentucky who, out of work in New York, sells her virginity in exchange for twelve dollars and a dinner. (\u201cShe hadn\u2019t the faintest idea how to go about this professionally.\u201d) Stout complained that her editor was \u201cdifficult to please.\u201d He called her into his office, she recounted, and \u201che said he would probably buy everything I wrote if I didn\u2019t have such a peculiar point of view about a lot of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cStep aside, Larry. I have some unfinished business to take care of.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Rex Stout began writing short stories in the nineteen-tens, too, and published his first detective story in 1914. Finding that there wasn\u2019t much money in it, he became a businessman. Ruth also gave up writing, but became more of a bohemian\u2014and more of a Bolshevik. She moved to Greenwich Village and, with a friend named Kitty Morton, opened up a tearoom called the Wisp, where regulars included the pioneering photojournalist Jessie Tarbox Beals. She became a political radical and a sex radical. She bobbed her hair. She organized strikes. She and Rex both became Socialists. On a trip to California, she stopped in Colorado to visit two of her mother\u2019s sisters. \u201cI could hardly wait to shock them with the news that I was a Socialist,\u201d she later wrote. But, when she made her announcement, one of them said, more or less, \u201cWell, naturally,\u201d and the other said that she herself had been all but raised on Eugene\u00a0V. Debs<\/a>\u2019s knee.<\/p>\n

She and Kitty had a falling out, and so she opened her own tearoom\u2014one with a dance floor, \u201con 4th Street, just off 6th Avenue.\u201d She called it the Klicket. She had by now fallen in love with an eccentric named Fred Rossiter (a Jew who had been born in Frankfurt as Alfred Rosenblatt). The hitch was that he was already married. In \u201cThe League of Frightened Men<\/a>\u201d (1935), Rex Stout has Nero Wolfe reading a book by an \u201cAlfred Rossiter\u201d called \u201cOutline of Human Nature.\u201d This was a joke. There is no such book. Rossiter\u2019s sole published book, from 1915, is \u201cA Pocket Manual for Character Analysts and Employment Managers Based on the Blackford System<\/a>,\u201d which offers a method for classifying workers by various physical and mental features. It\u2019s an employment manual, but it is also, in its own way, a study of human nature.<\/p>\n

In 1918, Ruth had to give up the tearoom. It had lost too much money. Her life began to collapse. In 1919, Rossiter broke things off with Ruth. After she learned that Rossiter and his wife had a baby, her hair turned white.<\/p>\n

She published a poem called \u201cThe Wedding Contract\u201d:<\/p>\n

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Of course, the whole thing\u2019s wrong;
What they should say is this:
\u201cI take this man and live with him
Until we both get on each other\u2019s nerves
To such a point
That we can\u2019t stand it any longer.\u201d
But, if it must be binding,
Till death do them part,
\u2019Twould be honester to say:
\u201cI take this man
And live with him
If it kills me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIf you want a new enthusiasm,\u201d Rex told her, \u201cyou ought to go hear Scott Nearing.\u201d Nearing was an Ivy League economist, a charismatic social reformer, and a political dissident, and she quickly fell under his spell. She became first his student, then his secretary, and finally his mistress. Nearing had lost his job as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for his political views. The provost had urged him to modify his teaching about subjects like poverty and child labor; Nearing refused. The university trustees then effectively fired him, citing his \u201cpublic utterances.\u201d A furor ensued\u2014the Nearing case, which the Literary Digest<\/em> described as the \u201cbiggest fight for academic freedom yet launched in an American university,\u201d led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors. \u201cThe future of the Democracy hangs on the guarantee of free speech,\u201d Nearing said in 1916. A year later, opposed to America\u2019s entry into the war in Europe, he published an antiwar book called \u201cThe Great Madness,\u201d and was indicted for sedition. \u201cScott Nearing! You have heard of Scott Nearing. He is the greatest teacher in the United States,\u201d Eugene Debs said, in a speech in Ohio in 1918, just before he himself was arrested and jailed for sedition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHe seemed to represent everything towards which my thoughts and ideals were groping,\u201d Ruth Stout wrote, describing her first encounters with Nearing. While working as his secretary, she began writing for socialist and radical papers and magazines, including the Call<\/em> and The Nation<\/em>. Working at a socialist summer camp, Camp Tamiment, in Bushkill, Pennsylvania, she was exposed to a new set of ideas about farming. She came across Knut Hamsun\u2019s 1917 book, \u201cGrowth of the Soil<\/a>,\u201d translated from the Norwegian, a novel about the conflict between agrarianism and modernity. Concerns about what plowing was doing to soil were growing in the U.S. well before the Dust Bowl of the thirties. In 1928, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would publish a circular called \u201cSoil Erosion: A National Menace,\u201d warning that \u201cremoval of forest growth, grass and shrubs and breaking the ground surface by cultivation, the trampling of livestock, etc., accentuate erosion to a degree far beyond that taking place under average natural conditions, especially on those soils that are peculiarly susceptible to rainwash.\u201d The very dirt was dying.<\/p>\n

During the twenties, Stout studied the soil, and she studied Russian, eventually becoming fluent. She was very likely exposed to the ideas of the Polish-born Jan Owsi\u0144ski\u2014a figure something like Levin in \u201cAnna Karenina<\/a>\u201d\u2014who introduced the notion of no-till farming in Russia in 1899 with \u201cThe New System of Farming,\u201d which was published again in 1902, 1905, and 1909 and was the subject of discussion in more than seventy progressive publications between 1899 and 1912. She could also have learned about what was called the Ovsinskyi System on a trip to the Soviet Union during which, in 1924, she attended Lenin\u2019s funeral and toured the Kremlin. When she returned, she was asked, by everyone, to report on the Revolution; instead, she reported on rural life. \u201cI talked incessantly,\u201d she wrote, \u201cabout the beauty of the Russian steppe, the valuable amber that the Russian peasant women wore around their necks, the steam bath, the long, beautiful sleigh-rides.\u201d She also talked about the \u201cmillions of lilacs\u201d in Buzuluk. In New York, she wondered whether she was \u201chomesick for Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spent much time in the twenties with Nearing on his farm, in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where they restored the soil and grew their own food. Nearing prepared to travel to Russia and China. \u201cWe worked on the book he was writing, answered his mail, worked in the garden, went swimming,\u201d she wrote. They sifted dirt through sieves. (Nearing\u2019s wife appeared indifferent to his infidelity. \u201cYou should see the huge pile of dirt Ruth screened this morning,\u201d Nearing told her over breakfast one day.) Inspired by Nearing, Stout had become a vegetarian. Meanwhile, she served as secretary and business manager for The<\/em> New Masses<\/em>, a socialist magazine that Rex had helped found. But she did a great deal more than manage the office, as her correspondence with the editor Joseph Freeman reveals. \u201cWhat am I? On what terms am I engaged?\u201d she complained to Freeman. She gave both Nearing and Freeman lessons in Russian. Freeman called her Ruth Ivanovna. She signed her letters to him, in Russian, \u201cAll the best, Ruthinka.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rex, too, was caught up in a circle of American radicals that very much involved Nearing, who appears to have feared that Ruth was having an affair with Freeman. \u201cScott wants you to have dinner with him\u2014with us,\u201d she wrote Freeman. \u201cHe wants to talk about style and The<\/em> New Masses<\/em>.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. And it\u2019s your chance to talk to him about China.\u201d She also told Freeman she would happily divide her time equally between him and Nearing \u201cfor dictation, typing, or anything.\u201d In 1927, Nearing joined the Communist Party. Rex separated from The<\/em> New Masses<\/em>, realizing that \u201cit was Communist and intended to stay Communist.\u201d But Ruth\u2019s dedication to the cause was far deeper. She wrote Freeman:<\/p>\n

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God made S.N. and gave him charm and genius and a certain smile and put him in the radical world. He made J.F. and gave him charm and genius and a certain tone of voice and uncertain eyes and put him in the world of art. And God looked on his handiwork and saw that it was good.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. R.S. looked around the radical world and found a certain smile, and she looked around the world of art and heard a certain tone of voice and looked into an uncertain pair of eyes,\u2014and God watched her work and saw that it was not so bad!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nevertheless, she eventually left The<\/em> New Masses<\/em>, telling Freeman that if she believed in nervous breakdowns she\u2019d have had one by then. She didn\u2019t so much denounce Communism as drift away from it. Her affair with Scott Nearing faltered. \u201cOur romance seemed to me a little anemic,\u201d she wrote. McAleer wrote, of Ruth, \u201cShe did not want to be Mrs. Nearing.\u201d In any event, in 1929, Nearing left his wife and children not for Ruth but for another woman, Helen Knothe, whom he eventually married. The couple moved to Vermont, where they became a part of the back-to-the-land movement of the thirties. By then, Ruth had made a similar move, with a different man. In 1927, Fred Rossiter left his wife and he and Ruth moved in together in New York. She began working for The Nation<\/em>. She and Rossiter were married in 1929. She was forty-four. She did not take his name. They moved to a fifty-five-acre farm in Redding Ridge, Connecticut, that they called Poverty Hollow. Two years before, her brother had bought a plot of eighteen acres a dozen miles away. He called it High Meadow. She ran her farm like a Communist summer camp.<\/p>\n

Nearly as soon as Ruth Stout moved into the old farmhouse at Poverty Hollow, she built a kitchen and a washroom in the barn. Her brother helped her plant a garden. It was the Depression. Her friends never had any money, and now they had less. She told all the people she knew that they were welcome to come stay. That first year, she and Rossiter had hundreds of guests. It got to be so much that she printed a flyer, titled \u201cCash & Carry Farm,\u201d explaining terms to visitors. \u201cWe supply only: Beds, Blankets, Light, Fuel for cooking, Cooking utensils,\u201d it read. \u201cWe expect you to furnish: Bedlinen (if you want it), Towels, Dish Towels and Food.\u201d The barn was hardly ever empty. \u201cCome any time and stay as long as you like.\u201d Around then, she decided to expand her garden. Meanwhile, she kept a hand in politics, serving on the board of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (\u201cWe defend militant labor and the victims of racial oppression\u201d). She remained close to Nearing, and when he lectured before the committee in 1935 she threw him a party.<\/p>\n

Having made a fortune in business, Rex Stout built\u2014himself\u2014a house at High Meadow, and, in its woodshop, he built its furniture. He also grew his own vegetables, though he was much more interested in flowers: he cultivated a renowned iris garden. Above all, and at long last, he returned to writing. Beginning in 1929, he published a series of fairly scandalous and highly sexed novels, with mixed success. Anonymously, he published a political thriller called \u201cThe President Vanishes,\u201d a warning about the rise of American fascism. In 1933, he decided to try writing crime fiction. The first Nero Wolfe novel, \u201cFer-de-Lance<\/a>,\u201d appeared the following year.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether Rex intended Wolfe to be a recurring character. His publisher urged him to alternate his Nero Wolfe mysteries with novels featuring a new detective. In 1936, at a time when he was regularly visiting and sharing seeds and gardening tips with Ruth, Rex created Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner, one of the earliest female detectives in American fiction, in a novel called \u201cThe Hand in the Glove<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bonner is eccentric and fierce and, jilted by a fianc\u00e9, something of a man-hater. \u201cI dislike all men,\u201d she announces, exuding much the same authority and coldheartedness with which Wolfe so frequently tells his Watson, Archie Goodwin, not to let any woman into the house. Rex is a king, Nero is an emperor, and \u201cTheodolinda\u201d is a reference to a sixth-century Germanic queen. Dol Bonner is, more or less, Nero Wolfe\u2019s sister: a fictional Ruth Stout.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cGod expects me to stand up fearless for what I believe, to speak up against what I think is wrong, but not to worry, either in small personal matters or in world affairs, for fear,\u201d Ruth once wrote. Bonner abides by Ruth\u2019s rule for living. In \u201cThe Hand in the Glove,\u201d Bonner solves the murder of P.\u00a0L. Storrs, committed in a country garden: \u201cShe knew Storrs took especial pride in the vegetable garden, and she turned aside and went through a gap in a yew hedge to give it a look, but saw only tomatoes and pole beans and tiled celery and late corn and fat pumpkins impatient for the frost.\u201d During an inspection of the vegetable garden, she considered the nature of soil, and of mulch, as she walked past \u201clow brick-walled compartments for compost heaps, and stood looking at the conglomerate mass ready for decay on the heap most recently begun: corn husks, spoiled tomatoes, cabbage leaves and roots, celery tops, carrot tops, a little pile of watermelon meat, faint and pink and unripe.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. She thought, \u2018So recently living and growing, and now no good for anything until it rots.\u2019\u00a0\u201d The key to the mystery comes when she finds gloves worn by the murderer, hidden inside a \u201clarge fine melon.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1938, the year after \u201cThe Hand in the Glove\u201d was published, Whittaker Chambers, a Communist who had known Ruth Stout when he worked at the Daily Worker<\/em> (to which she contributed, and in which her political protests were chronicled), stole some important papers from the federal government. In 1948, when Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he revealed the existence of the papers; it was later found that he had hidden them inside a pumpkin at his farm, in Maryland (a method of concealment not unlike hiding gloves in a watermelon). Representative Richard Nixon, a crusading anti-Communist, then made a famous speech about the so-called Pumpkin Papers, and the papers featured prominently in the trial of Alger Hiss. These events marked the beginning of the era of McCarthyism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ruth Stout, noted ex-Communist, was never hauled before McCarthy\u2019s committee. This may have been owing to the influence of her brother, now not only a celebrated writer but also a celebrated patriot. During the Second World War, Rex, as the \u201clie detective,\u201d had led the Writers\u2019 War Board and delivered a series of radio addresses, debunking German and Soviet propaganda. (\u201cLike Nero Wolfe, Stout is a fallacy detector,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em> wrote.) Still, he had that dodgy background. His F.B.I. file runs to hundreds of pages, documenting everything from his earliest political activities to his death. J.\u00a0Edgar Hoover<\/a> hated him, especially after Rex published a Nero Wolfe novel in 1965 that was, in essence, an extended indictment of the F.B.I. Ruth\u2019s scant notices in the files of the F.B.I. cover only the years 1927-38. After that, the Bureau apparently lost interest in her. No longer a Red, by the fifties she had reinvented herself as America\u2019s favorite green thumb.<\/p>\n

\u201cOrganic gardening,\u201d by that name, came to the United States during the Second World War, alongside the Victory Garden movement. In 1942, J.\u00a0I. Rodale, the founder of the Soil Health Foundation, began publishing a magazine called Organic Farming and Gardening<\/em>. Rodale endorsed, for instance, compost heaps. \u201cThe introduction of the organic method into the United States may be likened to a war,\u201d Rodale said in 1949. Ruth Stout, who had been pioneering her own kind of gardening for more than a decade before Rodale came along, became a regular contributor to the magazine. She popularized no-till gardening, though when asked if she\u2019d invented deep mulching she said, \u201cWell, naturally, I don\u2019t think so; God invented it simply by deciding to have the leaves fall off the trees once a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Stout likely learned about what she called no-work gardening from her reading or while working on socialist farms or during her travels in Russia, in the twenties. (The Soviet Union itself, so far from adopting the Ovsinskyi System, introduced the aggressive use of mechanized plowing that, together with forced collectivization, contributed to widespread famine.) By the forties, Stout was growing nearly everything she and Rossiter ate, and feeding their freeloaders, too. She did all this by undertaking very little work. Free the worker! She had no use for Rodale\u2019s compost piles: \u201cI\u2019m against them. They are so unnecessary. Why pile everything somewhere and then haul it to where you need it?\u201d Hay, old mail, newspapers, ashes, food waste, whatever: she threw it all in her garden, which looked a right mess. Despite appearances, her method yielded impressive results. She once grew a fifty-one-pound blue Hubbard squash\u2014during a four-month drought. About her only expense was paying a neighboring farmer to cut down the hay she grew in a meadow.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe deepest cut was when Brutus said that no one likes my trademark bangs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cartoon by Asher Perlman<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1953, Nearing and his wife published a book called \u201cLiving the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World,\u201d touting their methods of homesteading. A year later, Stout, seventy-one, published her first book, \u201cHow to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back: A New Method of Mulch Gardening.\u201d She burst into print that year, also publishing a magazine article titled \u201cThrow Away Your Spade and Hoe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next year, she published an article in Popular Gardening<\/em> called \u201cLet\u2019s Plant Iris,\u201d a somewhat begrudging profile of her brother. At High Meadow, Rex Stout grew a hundred and eighty-six varieties of iris on three acres. \u201cAt the height of the season the jungle of color is overwhelming,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt runs all the way from the tall, cool elegance of Lady Mohr to the blazing braggadocio of Fire Dance. The pure proud white of Snow King; the incredibly deep rich yellow of Ola Kala; the lovely full blue of Chivalry; the velvety deep darkness, almost black, of Sable; the gay flippant medley of Argus Pheasant; the dual personality of Pinnacle, with milkmaids for standards and duchesses for falls; the delicate virginity of Pink Cameo and Cherie; the misty shimmer of Blue Rhythm; the spectacular virtuosity of good old Ranger.\u201d Her brother, she reported, kept a record of his irises, a loose-leaf notebook with a page for every variety. He told her, \u201cEach year, as buds start to open, I begin to make entries.\u201d VW for \u201cverdict: wonderful.\u201d VG for \u201cverdict: good.\u201d He grew marvellous flowers; she knew she grew better vegetables.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the Ruth Stout Method. Start with a patch of grass. Don\u2019t even bother to turn over the turf. Cover the grass with eight inches of hay or straw. Don\u2019t skimp, and, ideally, don\u2019t pay for it: you can get spoiled hay from a local farmer, or you can barter for it. Then, year-round, throw everything organic on top of it. Food waste, cardboard, newspapers, grass clippings, dead leaves, sticks, stumps. Anything. All of it. Always. When the time comes for planting, push the hay aside, toss some seeds on the soil underneath, and cover it up again. You\u2019ll need to thin your plants and pick your vegetables when they\u2019re ready. But that\u2019s all. Your garden will be very ugly. You may hear from your neighbors. (Stout\u2019s neighbors didn\u2019t mind that her garden was not pleasing to look at, but she preferred to garden fully naked, so they kept their distance, anyway.)<\/p>\n

The Ruth Stout Method isn\u2019t really Ruth Stout\u2019s. It\u2019s just that, in the fifties, it was necessary to call it something other than Russian. In the McCarthy era, no one wanted to garden like a Communist.<\/p>\n

During a second back-to-the-land movement, in the sixties and early seventies, Ruth Stout\u2019s books gained a cult following. She and Nearing became the figurative grandmother and grandfather of a generation of hippies and lovers of communes. In 1964, Stout appeared as a contestant on the TV quiz show \u201cI\u2019ve Got a Secret.\u201d Her secret was that she\u2019d smashed a saloon with Carrie Nation in 1901. Except that wasn\u2019t really her secret. Her secret was that she\u2019d been a Socialist and a Communist and a sex radical. (For Nearing, the political part of his life was never a secret; in 1981, at ninety-eight, he appeared, as himself, in the film \u201cReds.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the seventies, she became something of an inspiration to the women\u2019s-liberation movement. In 1972, Ms<\/em>. magazine wanted to profile her. \u201cWomen\u2019s libbers, they bore me,\u201d she once said. No profile appeared.<\/p>\n

As they aged, Ruth and Rex Stout found it harder to travel to see each another, to make it across those scant dozen miles that separated Poverty Hollow from High Meadow. They still swapped seeds.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

January 26, 1972<\/p>\n

Dear Ruth:<\/p>\n

Someone sent me two packets of cucumber seeds from Holland and here is one of them\u2014if you want to find out what a Dutch cucumber is like.<\/p>\n

Love, Rex<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cReading bores me,\u201d Ruth wrote Rex in 1972, when she was eighty-eight and he was eighty-six. But there was an exception: \u201cNero and Archie never bore me.\u201d Mainly, she was writing to talk gardening, signing off, \u201cThat lovely manure I promised you is here waiting.\u201d In the end, it always came back to cow shit. But she remained, as ever, a freethinker. When she was almost ninety, she sent a postcard to CBS that read, \u201cI\u2019m planning to kill President Nixon. I\u2019m willing to spend the rest of my life in prison for doing it. My question is: After I kill Nixon and go to prison, who\u2019s going to take care of Agnew?\u201d It prompted the F.B.I. to send two agents to her house; they quickly realized \u201cthat a woman almost ninety years old had no immediate plans to kill the president.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Rex Stout died in 1975. The next year, his sister was the subject of a documentary, \u201cRuth Stout\u2019s Garden.\u201d In the voice-over, she says that she lived in New York until she was forty-five, \u201cnever once wishing that I could have a garden.\u201d But she wasn\u2019t at Poverty Hollow for more than ten minutes before she looked at the lilacs and the apple tree and decided she wanted to start gardening. She did not mention Moscow.<\/p>\n

Ruth Stout, Ruthinka, Theodolinda Bonner, died at Poverty Hollow in 1980, at the age of ninety-six. She donated her body to Yale Medical School. Aside from the papers and letters she sent to Joseph Freeman and John McAleer, her brother\u2019s biographer, her unpublished writings have all disappeared: she threw them on the garden.<\/p>\n

A neighbor of mine gave me a copy of \u201cGardening Without Work\u201d a few years back. He\u2019d found it in his attic. It\u2019s from 1961. I reread it every year. \u201cIt is October, and I trust your garden looks terrible, with dead vines, corn stalks, clumsy cabbage roots\u2014refuse\u2014all over it,\u201d Stout writes. \u201cAnd I do hope you will leave everything there, and add the kitchen garbage to it through the winter.\u201d Winter comes, then January, February. My garden looks like a trash heap. March arrives. \u201cA crocus opens its eyes. A redwing calls. You love winter, you really do, but this is something quite different.\u201d Does anyone know a farmer willing to part with a few bales of spoiled hay?\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Jill Lepore
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven\u2019t heard of Ruth Stout, you haven\u2019t spent much time in the Home and Garden section of a bookstore lately, and you haven\u2019t been listening to gardening or homesteading podcasts, either. Stout, who died nearly half a century ago, lived most of her life in the shadow of her far more famous brother<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":838757,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1963,31172],"tags":[5637,16666],"class_list":{"0":"post-838756","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-american","8":"category-radical","9":"tag-american","10":"tag-radical"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}