If you haven’t heard of Ruth Stout, you haven’t spent much time in the Home and Garden section of a bookstore lately, and you haven’t 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’s Shouts & Murmurs column, was convinced that he was the inspiration for Wolfe—like Wolfe, he was famously fat—and even took to calling himself Nero. “It was useless for Stout to protest,” The New Yorker reported in a Profile of Stout in 1949. “Nothing could convince Woollcott that he had not been plagiarized bodily.” 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—if not by his loyal fan club, the Wolfe Pack—but a whole lot of people are talking about his sister.
Ruth Stout’s three biggest books, “How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back” (1955), “Gardening Without Work” (1961), and “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book” (1971), have all been reissued in the past few years. What’s known as the Ruth Stout Method—“I 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”—is an inevitable subject on podcasts like “The Beet,” “Farmish Kind of Life,” “The Daily Farmer,” “Maritime Gardening,” and “She Said Homestead.” Stout is the bee’s knees, the goddess of soil, the doyenne of dirt. She’s 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, 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—“MY RUTH STOUT GARDEN FAILED” and “No More Ruth Stout”—but there are many more lovers: “How to Use the Ruth Stout Method to Get Amazing Results” and “Ruth Stout is the best!” There are even tribute videos. She is the Beyoncé of the back yard.
Rex Stout, who was the head of the Authors Guild, wrote fifty-two novels. (“I don’t know how many times I have reread the Nero Wolfe stories, but plenty,” P. G. Wodehouse 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, “he had more books in print than any other living American writer had.”
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 “detective-story king”; she became the “mulch queen.” 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’d read everything Rex had, only she had read it first. “I don’t want to be remembered as Rex Stout’s sister,” she said. “I want him to be remembered as Ruth Stout’s brother.” She’s gotten her wish. At long last, she’s having her day in the sun. She didn’t plow and she didn’t dig. She didn’t use fertilizers or pesticides. She never watered or weeded. Not for nothing did she call her method “no-work gardening.” She didn’t really believe in work. No tilling, no hoeing. No buying, no selling. What’s 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!
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.
“Was Rex the family pet?” he asked her.
“No,” she wrote back.
“How did your mother react to Rex’s success as a writer?”
“I think she would have preferred it if he hadn’t written about murder.”
But she also bridled at McAleer’s endless questions. She once wrote a book called “It’s a Woman’s World,” but she knew it wasn’t. She decided to use the occasion of her correspondence with her brother’s biographer to tell him a great deal about her life. And then: she sent him the manuscript of her autobiography. “I’m mailing the ms. today & forget that promise to return it in 48 hours,” she wrote him. “I’m in no hurry for it. I sort of ran thro it & was a little surprised at how dull it is.” He never sent it back. It wasn’t dull.
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’t 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: “When I was a girl, I took out a book, the title of which was ‘Will Power,’ from the library. When my mother saw me reading it, she said, ‘Oh, Ruth! Do you really think you need more will power?’ ” The family moved to the city—Topeka—when 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’d been working as a bookkeeper), and, “with $117.00 in my pocket-book, without a job and with Rex’s typewriter sitting idle,” she writes, “I decided this was probably as good a time as any to find out if I was a writer.” She had success in the pulps, with O. Henry-style stories like “Just Hungry,” 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. (“She hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about this professionally.”) Stout complained that her editor was “difficult to please.” He called her into his office, she recounted, and “he said he would probably buy everything I wrote if I didn’t have such a peculiar point of view about a lot of things.”
Rex Stout began writing short stories in the nineteen-tens, too, and published his first detective story in 1914. Finding that there wasn’t much money in it, he became a businessman. Ruth also gave up writing, but became more of a bohemian—and 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’s sisters. “I could hardly wait to shock them with the news that I was a Socialist,” she later wrote. But, when she made her announcement, one of them said, more or less, “Well, naturally,” and the other said that she herself had been all but raised on Eugene V. Debs’s knee.
She and Kitty had a falling out, and so she opened her own tearoom—one with a dance floor, “on 4th Street, just off 6th Avenue.” 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 “The League of Frightened Men” (1935), Rex Stout has Nero Wolfe reading a book by an “Alfred Rossiter” called “Outline of Human Nature.” This was a joke. There is no such book. Rossiter’s sole published book, from 1915, is “A Pocket Manual for Character Analysts and Employment Managers Based on the Blackford System,” which offers a method for classifying workers by various physical and mental features. It’s an employment manual, but it is also, in its own way, a study of human nature.
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.
She published a poem called “The Wedding Contract”:
“If you want a new enthusiasm,” Rex told her, “you ought to go hear Scott Nearing.” 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 “public utterances.” A furor ensued—the Nearing case, which the Literary Digest described as the “biggest fight for academic freedom yet launched in an American university,” led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors. “The future of the Democracy hangs on the guarantee of free speech,” Nearing said in 1916. A year later, opposed to America’s entry into the war in Europe, he published an antiwar book called “The Great Madness,” and was indicted for sedition. “Scott Nearing! You have heard of Scott Nearing. He is the greatest teacher in the United States,” Eugene Debs said, in a speech in Ohio in 1918, just before he himself was arrested and jailed for sedition.
“He seemed to represent everything towards which my thoughts and ideals were groping,” 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 and The Nation. 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’s 1917 book, “Growth of the Soil,” 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 “Soil Erosion: A National Menace,” warning that “removal 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.” The very dirt was dying.
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 Owsiński—a figure something like Levin in “Anna Karenina”—who introduced the notion of no-till farming in Russia in 1899 with “The New System of Farming,” 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’s funeral and toured the Kremlin. When she returned, she was asked, by everyone, to report on the Revolution; instead, she reported on rural life. “I talked incessantly,” she wrote, “about 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.” She also talked about the “millions of lilacs” in Buzuluk. In New York, she wondered whether she was “homesick for Russia.”
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. “We worked on the book he was writing, answered his mail, worked in the garden, went swimming,” she wrote. They sifted dirt through sieves. (Nearing’s wife appeared indifferent to his infidelity. “You should see the huge pile of dirt Ruth screened this morning,” 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 New Masses, 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. “What am I? On what terms am I engaged?” 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, “All the best, Ruthinka.”
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. “Scott wants you to have dinner with him—with us,” she wrote Freeman. “He wants to talk about style and The New Masses. . . . And it’s your chance to talk to him about China.” She also told Freeman she would happily divide her time equally between him and Nearing “for dictation, typing, or anything.” In 1927, Nearing joined the Communist Party. Rex separated from The New Masses, realizing that “it was Communist and intended to stay Communist.” But Ruth’s dedication to the cause was far deeper. She wrote Freeman:
Nevertheless, she eventually left The New Masses, telling Freeman that if she believed in nervous breakdowns she’d have had one by then. She didn’t so much denounce Communism as drift away from it. Her affair with Scott Nearing faltered. “Our romance seemed to me a little anemic,” she wrote. McAleer wrote, of Ruth, “She did not want to be Mrs. Nearing.” 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. 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.
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 “Cash & Carry Farm,” explaining terms to visitors. “We supply only: Beds, Blankets, Light, Fuel for cooking, Cooking utensils,” it read. “We expect you to furnish: Bedlinen (if you want it), Towels, Dish Towels and Food.” The barn was hardly ever empty. “Come any time and stay as long as you like.” 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 (“We defend militant labor and the victims of racial oppression”). She remained close to Nearing, and when he lectured before the committee in 1935 she threw him a party.
Having made a fortune in business, Rex Stout built—himself—a 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 “The President Vanishes,” a warning about the rise of American fascism. In 1933, he decided to try writing crime fiction. The first Nero Wolfe novel, “Fer-de-Lance,” appeared the following year.
It’s 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 “The Hand in the Glove.”
Bonner is eccentric and fierce and, jilted by a fiancé, something of a man-hater. “I dislike all men,” 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 “Theodolinda” is a reference to a sixth-century Germanic queen. Dol Bonner is, more or less, Nero Wolfe’s sister: a fictional Ruth Stout.
“God 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,” Ruth once wrote. Bonner abides by Ruth’s rule for living. In “The Hand in the Glove,” Bonner solves the murder of P. L. Storrs, committed in a country garden: “She 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.” During an inspection of the vegetable garden, she considered the nature of soil, and of mulch, as she walked past “low 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. . . . She thought, ‘So recently living and growing, and now no good for anything until it rots.’ ” The key to the mystery comes when she finds gloves worn by the murderer, hidden inside a “large fine melon.”
In 1938, the year after “The Hand in the Glove” was published, Whittaker Chambers, a Communist who had known Ruth Stout when he worked at the Daily Worker (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.
Ruth Stout, noted ex-Communist, was never hauled before McCarthy’s 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 “lie detective,” had led the Writers’ War Board and delivered a series of radio addresses, debunking German and Soviet propaganda. (“Like Nero Wolfe, Stout is a fallacy detector,” The New Yorker 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. Edgar Hoover 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’s 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’s favorite green thumb.
“Organic gardening,” by that name, came to the United States during the Second World War, alongside the Victory Garden movement. In 1942, J. I. Rodale, the founder of the Soil Health Foundation, began publishing a magazine called Organic Farming and Gardening. Rodale endorsed, for instance, compost heaps. “The introduction of the organic method into the United States may be likened to a war,” 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’d invented deep mulching she said, “Well, naturally, I don’t think so; God invented it simply by deciding to have the leaves fall off the trees once a year.”
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’s compost piles: “I’m against them. They are so unnecessary. Why pile everything somewhere and then haul it to where you need it?” 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—during a four-month drought. About her only expense was paying a neighboring farmer to cut down the hay she grew in a meadow.
In 1953, Nearing and his wife published a book called “Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World,” touting their methods of homesteading. A year later, Stout, seventy-one, published her first book, “How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back: A New Method of Mulch Gardening.” She burst into print that year, also publishing a magazine article titled “Throw Away Your Spade and Hoe.”
The next year, she published an article in Popular Gardening called “Let’s Plant Iris,” a somewhat begrudging profile of her brother. At High Meadow, Rex Stout grew a hundred and eighty-six varieties of iris on three acres. “At the height of the season the jungle of color is overwhelming,” she wrote. “It 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.” Her brother, she reported, kept a record of his irises, a loose-leaf notebook with a page for every variety. He told her, “Each year, as buds start to open, I begin to make entries.” VW for “verdict: wonderful.” VG for “verdict: good.” He grew marvellous flowers; she knew she grew better vegetables.
Here’s the Ruth Stout Method. Start with a patch of grass. Don’t even bother to turn over the turf. Cover the grass with eight inches of hay or straw. Don’t skimp, and, ideally, don’t 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’ll need to thin your plants and pick your vegetables when they’re ready. But that’s all. Your garden will be very ugly. You may hear from your neighbors. (Stout’s neighbors didn’t mind that her garden was not pleasing to look at, but she preferred to garden fully naked, so they kept their distance, anyway.)
The Ruth Stout Method isn’t really Ruth Stout’s. It’s 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.
During a second back-to-the-land movement, in the sixties and early seventies, Ruth Stout’s 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 “I’ve Got a Secret.” Her secret was that she’d smashed a saloon with Carrie Nation in 1901. Except that wasn’t really her secret. Her secret was that she’d 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 “Reds.”)
In the seventies, she became something of an inspiration to the women’s-liberation movement. In 1972, Ms. magazine wanted to profile her. “Women’s libbers, they bore me,” she once said. No profile appeared.
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.
“Reading bores me,” Ruth wrote Rex in 1972, when she was eighty-eight and he was eighty-six. But there was an exception: “Nero and Archie never bore me.” Mainly, she was writing to talk gardening, signing off, “That lovely manure I promised you is here waiting.” 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, “I’m planning to kill President Nixon. I’m 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’s going to take care of Agnew?” It prompted the F.B.I. to send two agents to her house; they quickly realized “that a woman almost ninety years old had no immediate plans to kill the president.”
Rex Stout died in 1975. The next year, his sister was the subject of a documentary, “Ruth Stout’s Garden.” In the voice-over, she says that she lived in New York until she was forty-five, “never once wishing that I could have a garden.” But she wasn’t 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.
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’s biographer, her unpublished writings have all disappeared: she threw them on the garden.
A neighbor of mine gave me a copy of “Gardening Without Work” a few years back. He’d found it in his attic. It’s from 1961. I reread it every year. “It is October, and I trust your garden looks terrible, with dead vines, corn stalks, clumsy cabbage roots—refuse—all over it,” Stout writes. “And I do hope you will leave everything there, and add the kitchen garbage to it through the winter.” Winter comes, then January, February. My garden looks like a trash heap. March arrives. “A crocus opens its eyes. A redwing calls. You love winter, you really do, but this is something quite different.” Does anyone know a farmer willing to part with a few bales of spoiled hay? ♦
