The Vine That Eats The South
June 21, 2013
By Tom Poland
June 21, 2013
In Georgia, the legend says that you must close your window at night to keep it out of the house. The glass is tinged with green, even so … Kudzu, by James Dickey.
First off let’s give thanks that Lowe’s and Home Depot don’t sell kudzu. What a mess we’d be in if they did. Just imagine seeing a plant that grows a foot a day everywhere you go. We don’t need that in the city.
Out in the country kudzu has long eaten the South and if you sit still as a stone near a mound of kudzu you can hear the plant growing. It’s a stretching noise like Saran wrap being pulled taut against the box’s serrated cutter.
Well I made that up but it ought to be true. Of all the strange shrubs, bushes, vines, and trees I’ve encountered, only kudzu scares me. It mounds up over the land, a green creature that devours all in its path. When I see a forest covered by this tree-eating plant I’ hate to speculate what’s inside all that tangled greenery. It seems to be the perfect place to hide a body and I’m sure some miscreant has.
A lot of forests and farmland have vanished into that leafy green sea some call the cancer of the plant world. By preventing trees from getting sunlight it starves them to death just like a cancer. Growing a foot a day it blankets trees, power poles, fences, yards, houses, cars, trucks—anything in its path.
It is one of the few invaders of the South that seems like a genuine part of this great homeland. In fact, few plants are so closely identified with the South. It has done what armadillos, hydrilla, coyotes, and some northern folks have not managed to do: become a cultural icon and yet it’s an exotic.
Kudzu likes the South. Humid, blistering days and sweaty nights provide near perfect conditions for kudzu’s rampages. Winters are mild with few hard freezes, the humidity is high, and most of the time ample rain falls. Combine all these factors and kudzu grows better here than it does in its native land of Japan. No wonder it covers more than seven million acres in the South.
Spreading for many miles, it reaches out and curls its tentacles around anything in its path. It’s difficult to eradicate once it takes hold. Years and years of herbicide don’t make a dent in it and in fact it has grown even faster after being treated by some herbicides. Its roots can reach twelve feet deep and weigh up to 500 pounds.
When I was a boy we had a tough patch of honeysuckle in the back yard. To kill it we put my Granddad Poland’s goats back there and they chewed it into oblivion. Kudzu isn’t so easily banished. Kudzu has no natural predators although I wonder what legions of goats or sheep might do to it.
If you can’t get rid of it you might as well use it. Granddad Walker put it to good use. He’d string hemp from column to column on his front porch and plat kudzu at the base of the lattice. As fast as you can say give me some shade kudzu would climb that latticework, serving up privacy and shade. That was handy come the Dog Days of August. A dense screen of kudzu blocked out the sun making it much cooler behind his ingenious buffer of greenery.
In Walhalla, a Cherokee lady by the appropriate name of Nancy Basket makes kudzu baskets. They’re as beautiful as the heralded sweetgrass baskets of the Lowcountry, and unlike sweetgrass, which is getting scarce, kudzu keeps on keeping on.
The pesky vine keeps making inroads into our culture. Near Elberton, Georgia you’ll find a road named for the plant. That means your new-fangled GPS devices must accommodate kudzu. Everything from restaurants to comic strips to rock bands has been named for the plant. Poets, as you see beneath the title, have written about it. Down in Tallahassee, Florida, at Florida State they produce a literary journal called The Kudzu Review. It’s even been thoughtfully covered in an essay, Kudzu: A Tale of Two Vines, by academic researchers Derek and Donna Alderman in Southern Cultures fall 2001 issue.
Kudzu came here in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Hyped as a decorative plant and as a way to control erosion no one could see how it would take over the South. Folks who promoted it were a tad naive of this plant’s ability to consume the landscape. (Time magazine would list kudzu’s introduction to the United States as one of the one hundred worst ideas of the 20th century.) Introducing Kudzu to the South was like introducing a match to gasoline, and for proof all you have to do is drive down most any southern backroad.
People believed this import could solve our erosion problems. Instead of deep red gullies they saw green vines and no more erosion. The champion of kudzu was Covington, Georgia’s Channing Cope. He envisioned the conversion of wastelands into kudzu pastures. That was the message he hammered through in his daily radio programs and Atlanta Journal-Constitution articles.
He started the Kudzu Club of America in the early 1940s. By 1943, 20,000 people had joined his club. The club’s goal was to plant one million acres of kudzu in Georgia and eight million acres in the South in general. Cope compared the planting of kudzu on heavily eroded land to a physician’s use of medicine to fight a disease.
In an ironic twist some say kudzu killed Cope. Cope’s friend Philip S. Cohen said that even after the government labeled the vine an ecological threat, Cope would not let the county cut back the profusion of kudzu patches on his land. The kudzu was so thick it enclosed the road leading to his home, Yellow River Plantation. Teenagers saw the dense kudzu canopy as a haven, a place to park and party. When Cope tried to run off these adolescent interlopers one evening, he walked three feet and fell dead from a massive heart attack.
Now we’re stuck with the plant Cope championed. As the Alderman’s write, Southerners both endure and embrace this pervasive part of life. Some wage an ecological battle against kudzu, while others use and market the vine in creative ways. Both southerners and non-southerners identify with kudzu as a symbol and incorporate the plant into daily cultural expression, including the language used to characterize and understand social and environmental change. As a national news wire reports, ‘So aggressive is kudzu that the word has entered American English as shorthand for out-of-control growth.’
In this respect, the plant illustrates the tremendous impact the American South has made, and continues to make, on national culture.
The plant has one merit at least. Kudzu’s long clusters of dark purple flowers bloom mostly in July and August. Mom tells me they give off a pleasant smell, much like grapes. The next time I see kudzu and it’s in bloom, Ill break my tradition of avoiding it and check it out. An old joke, however, gives me reason to proceed with care.
Lewis Grizzard had this to say about the infamous plant from Asia. Nothing grows faster than a kudzu vine. It has been known to cover entire homes in Georgia where the families are asleep for the night. They are then trapped inside and can’t get to a convenience store, so they starve. Those who try to eat their way out of kudzu quickly have their innards entangled in the vine because no matter how much you chew it, the blamed stuff just keeps on growing.
An old joke goes that a Yankee asks a southern farmer how to grow kudzu. (As if it needs help.) The farmer tells the Yankee to stomp on the ground a few times to get its attention, throw the kudzu seeds on the ground, then run like there’s no tomorrow.
Well one thing is certain. There is a tomorrow for kudzu. The plant that’s eating the South never goes on a diet. It’s hungry, and it’s here to stay.
Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]
Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.
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