A Many-Tentacled Monster Refuses to Die
There it is again. The old green creep that’s always crawling around the vacant lot across the street. The botanical bogey that scares small children. The leafy calamity that harbors bugs and snakes and that swallows farmhouses.
Kudzu. I hate it.
In Dixie, there’s a lot of kudzu to hate because the weed already covers 7million acres (by the Forest Service’s last count), and it’s still on the move. Up poles. Over trees. Under cars. Across back roads. Around abandoned household appliances. Down into the red clay with roots that can burrow 20 feet. And into the psyche of generations of Southerners who’ve been confounded by the wily vine.
Kudzu, Pueraria lobata, was brought to America by the Japanese 1876, and I’ll never forgive them. In my home state, back when Auburn University was Alabama Polytechnic, kudzu was scrutinized by agronomists who touted it as a remedy for soil erosion and a replacement for old King Cotton, a crop that had been withering since Reconstruction. What was to have been a peaceful transfer power, however, soon became a kudzu coup. In Japan and other northerly latitudes, harsh winters had kept kudzu in check but in the sweltering Southland, kudzu ran amok. Kudzu: The federal gov-
For more than sixty years folks loved kudzu. The government paid farmers as much as as $8 per cre to plant the verdant Medusa; kudzu club were founded; the Kudzu Queen of Greensboro, Alabama, was crowned in the 1930s; the movie Kurse of the Kudzu Kreature came out; and in the ’40s the vine became a popular feed crop for livestock.
Unfortunately, as a potent member of the bean family (Leguminosae), kudzu caused acute distress among our four-stomached bovine friends. An epidemic of cows plagued by that famous bloated feeling led to the invention of a lance for “popping” kudzu cattle.
But trying to eradicate kudzu from one’s own yard can be even more life-threatening than an exploding cow. My father once attempted to kill the kudzu that was taking over our backyard. First, with red face and blistered hands, he tried to pull it up during the winter, when the vine turns gray and dries out. Mama worried he’d electrocute himself pulling it of the power lines to the house, but before March had ended, her roses were choked and the green peril threatened the Buick. It was either us or the kudzu.
The roots had survived the attack, so the next winter, Daddy went at it with an old southern recipe for kudzu destruction: diesel fuel and a hoe. That failed, so he tried an axe. Then a bulldozer. Then weed killer. Nothing worked. Fortunately, I was away at camp when he escalated his fight with kudzu to Biblical proportions by sowing salt into the soil and setting fire to the lot.
The kudzu lived. We moved.
Unlike my parents, the rest of the South hasn’t given up trying wipe out kudzu. Researchers at North Carolina State University recently came up with a hybrid caterpillar-wasp bug that eats the
stuff. The caterpillars are injected with wasp larvae, a little trick at increases their hunger for kudzu. Then right before the caterpillar spin a cocoon, the wasps eat the caterpillars and, soon after, flies away. Is this the best solution modern science could come up with? I say, forget wasps. After all, things could be worse. Kudzu spawns grape-scented flowers, so the South can boast that it’s the only region of the country with telephone poles that smell like vineyards. And kudzu does have some positive attributes. Harvard University has published a study suggesting that kudzu roots may help alcoholics curb their appetite for hooch—a good thing, considering how many people the demon vine has doubtless driven to drink.
Sometimes, strolling over kudzu-covered hill and dale, I’m comforted by the thought that when the
Souths’ last barbecue smolders and dies, when the last pickup truck sputters to a stop, when the last column falls off the last plantation house, when diners in Yazoo, Mississippi, and Eufaula, Alabama, succumb to mocha-decaf-cappuccino-skim lattes, kudzu will still be there, creeping at a rate of 12 inches per day, tucking every vestige of our glorious region under a thick green quilt.
