Curious why there’s a big feature in this recent issue of New Yorker magazine about garden writer Ruth Stout? Maybe it’s because her three gardening books (“How to have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back” in 1955; “Gardening without Work” in 1961 and “The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book” in 1971) have been re-issued in “recent years.”

Or more probably, it was Stout’s new fame on social media – YouTube, on Tiktok where there are “millions of posts about her,” including tribute videos.  Thus the author of the piece, Jill Lepore, declares Stout “the bees’ knees, the goddess of soil, the doyenne of dirt.  She’s all over.” And here’s the quote used widely on the magazine’s social media accounts – “She’s the Beyonce of the back yard.” 

Stout the Gardening Guru

The recent surge in her popularity speaks to the seemingly universal desire for low maintenance gardening, if not “no-work” gardening altogether. According to this article, Stout never watered or weeded.  In her articles for Organic Gardening Magazine she popularized no-till gardening, but had little or 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?”

She simply used “Hay, old mail, newspapers, ashes, food waste, whatever, throwing it all in her garden, which looked a right mess.  Despite appearances, her method yielded impressive results.”

Oh, and her brother Rex Stout was known in the gardening for the 186 varieties of iris that he grew.

Photo in the public domain, found on Wikipedia.

Stout the Radical

Now for Lepore’s shockers:

“What’s wild is how little of her radical life is generally known. She was, for a very long time, a Communist…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.”

After moving to Greenwich Village, Stout “became a political radical and a sex radical. She bobbed her hair. She organized strikes. ” She contributed to the Daily Worker.

Stout wrote that if you follow her methods, “‘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.”

So what the hell does Lepore mean by “sex radical”? Just gardening naked, with “bobbed” hair? The writer offers no details about Stout’s supposed sexual radicalism, a term she uses twice in the article, and when I asked for more information on the magazine’s social media postings of the article, got no response. 

In this video of an interview with her (screen shot above) Stout says “I loved my husband very, very much.”  No hint of radicalism there.  She does comment on her habit of naked gardening: “I love the air on my body,” and fondly recalls her husband noticing the cars going slowly by whenever she did it.

Stout died in 1980 at the ripe age of 96.  And how fitting that “her unpublished writings have all disappeared – she threw them in the garden.” Putting them to good use in her mind, I suppose.