How an American Radical Reinvented Back-Yard Gardening

“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.

January 26, 1972

Dear Ruth:

Someone sent me two packets of cucumber seeds from Holland and here is one of them—if you want to find out what a Dutch cucumber is like.

Love, Rex

“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.”