Stefani embraces Shelton’s Oklahoma life

LOS ANGELES — She’s from suburban Orange County — he’s from rural Oklahoma.

And two years into their marriage, Gwen Stefani has learned to embrace the “dirt” of the ranch life with her husband and fellow musical artist, Blake Shelton.

“I am not really a dirt person, a bug person, I don’t like that much humidity,” Stefani told People in an interview this week. “But you sort of get over it all because it’s so beautiful [in Oklahoma], and you kind of feel like you’re going into this vortex and it’s just different here … I guess it’s just nature, and God, is all right there.”

When they weren’t filming “ The Voice,” or at their $13 million Encino mansion, the pop and country stars have been spending their time at Shelton’s 1,300-acre ranch in Tishomingo, Okla. Stefani said she also raises her three children there; she has Kingston, 17, Zuma, 15, and Apollo, 9, from her previous marriage to English rocker Gavin Rossdale. The property, known as the Ten Point Ranch, is also where Stefani and Shelton got married in July 2021 after dating since 2015.

When she started dating Shelton after their mutual divorces, she said, she immediately felt at home with him. Her first time in Oklahoma was an extension of that security, and she called it an escape” and a place to “get away … and think.” The radical difference from Hollywood, she said, was like “being introduced to a whole new world.”

The “Rich Girl” performer riffed on their different backgrounds in a video posted to TikTok last month that showed the pair riding in their mud-caked pickup truck along the ranch’s forested dirt roads. “When you’re with a guy from Oklahoma who rides tractors and you’re from Orange County but it just works,” wrote Stefani, who grew up in Anaheim.

Stefani said there was an adjustment phase when she would beckon the “God’s Country” singer to “just lay here and eat pizza” while he would run around the ranch doing chores. Despite their differences, it’s a rhythm she grew up seeing in her parents.

“When I was young, I’d walk home from school and see my mom in her shorts doing her gardening, and my dad would be cutting the trees and make me pick up the branches,” she told People “I’d be like, ‘I’m never having a tree at my house.’”

Now, when the couple returns to the ranch after filming in Hollywood or performing on the road, they both get right back to the soil.

“It’s just a different kind of work,” Stefani said. “It’s probably what my mom was doing back in the day, and now I get it.”