About Ruth

I'm Ruth Landry-Stone, and I live in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where the Rappahannock River runs through everything — the landscape, the history, and most of my conversations.

I started Gone Native because I couldn't stop talking about what grows here. The Ospreys and Great Blue Herons returning to feast on the river's bounty in spring. The "black slider" water turtles sunning themselves on sturdy logs. The native perennials poking through the soil as soon as the daylight gets longer and warmer. And yes, the dreaded wintercreeper that has got to go.

This journal is where I write about what I'm growing, what I'm reading, and what I think we should be paying more attention to. That includes native plants, green gardening practices, the occasional policy fight over things like PFAS in our soil, and the slow, quiet work of caring for a small piece of earth.

I'm an active member of the Virginia Native Plant Society (VNPS), Central Rappahannock Chapter. I do winter sowing with the chapter, attend the educational meetings, and spend a lot of time at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library finding books about gardening. When it's too cold to garden, I retreat to my sunroom — an interior tropical oasis of palm trees, begonias, and bromeliads — and read until I'm so ready for Spring.