The New Yorker:

Ruth Stout didn’t plow, dig, water, or weed—and now her “no-work” method is everywhere. But behind her secret to the perfect garden lay other secrets.

By Jill Lepore

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.

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