Alabama
November 2013
Oh, look. Alongside the road. The vine that ate the South.
Kudzu.
Back in the old days, the Japanese gave a 100th birthday present to the United States. It was kudzu. Americans loved the attractive sweet-smelling kudzu gardens that were mostly ornamental but could also be used as a forage crop. Soon other uses were discovered for the vine. It could be woven into baskets, made into paper, turned into kudzu blossom jelly and syrup, or deep fried to be used in quiche. Kudzu, while still in the ground, was also a champion at erosion control.
Kudzu had its hidden attributes however, its darker side, proving to be less the miraculous plant than it was believed to be. Cue the musical shock chord. For starters, kudzu grows at a ferocious rate, sometimes up to a foot a day. You can just about plop down in your lounge chair with your Cajun lemonade and watch as its volume increases. A single vine can reach up to 100 feet in length. With this talent, with this faculty, it becomes a monster, smothering other plants, encircling and choking stems and tree trunks and uprooting entire trees and shrubs through the sheer force of its own weight and tenacity.
Planting kudzu is easy. Just drop a few seeds on the ground and run like hell.
This vine, once promoted and freely distributed in the healthy, long-season growing environment of the South, now occupies more than 12 000 square miles in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and both Carolinas. It covers an area the size of the whole state of Maryland, which also has had its problems with this presumptuous, invasive creeper. In 1953, the U S Department of Agriculture declared kudzu a pest weed and took it off the list of permissible cover plants.
James Dickey, writer, guitar player, hunter, Poet Laureate, woodsman, war hero and Georgia boy, probably best known for penning the novel Deliverance, wrote a poem called Kudzu. Here’s part of it…
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house.
…
Your leg plunges somewhere
It should not, it never should be,
Disappears…
For when the kudzu comes,
The snakes do, and weave themselves
Among its lengthening vines.
…
The hogs disappear in the leaves.
The day we summit Cheaha Mountain, the high point of Alabama, we see fields of kudzu from the tower. The next day we pass a local resident in the grocery store. He’s got a kudzu tattoo on his arm. Hoodlum.
