Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghostsIn Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house.
- James Dickey, Georgia poet
I was driving a rented car between Atlanta, Ga., and Greenville, S.C., when I first saw it. Along the side of the freeway, which had run for several miles through a stretch of thick, Southern woodland, was a broad opening about half the size of a football field.
An overgrowth of vines blanketed the hillside in a mantle of green. Huge columns from what looked like an ancient Roman temple rose up against the forest. Thick vines swirled and twined over everything. It took my breath away - I was sure I had run across some ancient civilization, or at the very least a huge Southern mansion that had been overrun by vegetation.
But I was wrong.
At this point, anyone who has lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line is beginning to chuckle, for I have described a setting they are very familiar with, which I would run into in time and again as I drove through the Southern states.
I had simply come across a patch of kudzu, a fast-growing vine transplanted from the Orient in the 1800s. Used by the Japanese as an ornamental plant in their exhibition at the U.S. Centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, it has since spread over the South in a wave of growth that seems unstoppable.
Hardy and deep-rooted, kudzu can grow as much as a foot a day, suffocating everything in its path. All other plants succumb to its advance.
Power companies curse the day it arrived in the United States. Writhing up power poles, its weight alone can cause wood poles to tumble. Slithering up steel high-voltage towers, it wraps itself around electrical wires, causing electrical arcs and extensive damage to power systems.
What looked like a Roman coliseum or the vine-covered Doric columns of an old Southern mansion was no more than the remnants of huge trees crowded out by kudzu, with only their rotting trunks remaining to give an aura of ancient culture.
A member of the legume family, kudzu possesses a nutritive value comparative to alfalfa and an ability to restore nitrogen to the soil. Its deep roots also make it impervious to seasons of drought. For years, consequently, American horticulturists explored the possibilities of kudzu's use as a forage crop.
But its tangled masses of vines made harvesting difficult, and its uncontrollable growth pattern created a threat to other crops. Climbing over fences, it would crowd out everything in its path.
By the 1930s, kudzu had as firm a hold on the Southern landscape as magnolias and cotton. CCC crews had planted it along highways and gullies for erosion control - in retrospect, a questionable proposition. There seems to be no stopping kudzu once it has taken root.
An Arkansas farmer, quoted in a Smithsonian magazine article on kudzu in 1976, quipped, "When you plant kudzu, drop it and run!"
With new perspective, I continued my trip through the South, reminded, whenever I came across one of these lush acreages of enchanting vines, that to Southerners there is very little romance attached to kudzu. The suggestions of Mayan temples beneath these blankets of green are more likely the remains of barns abandoned by farmers - farmers for whom kudzu turned out to be much more of a nightmare than the dream they first imagined.