THE BOOK OF RUTH

How an American radical reinvented back-yard gardening.

- BY JILL LEPORE

Ruth Stout didn't plow or dig. She never watered or weeded. And, suddenly, her "no-work" method is everywhere.

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.