In Appalachia, it’s not hard to notice where the mountains seem to be disappearing beneath an emerald sea. Kudzu pours down hillsides, drapes the pines and rolls over barns, fences and telephone poles. In the distance, its shapes can be almost beautiful, like green fairy castles frozen beside the highway. But underneath that living blanket, the light of day has vanished. Trees strain beneath its weight, wildflowers disappear and entire pieces of the landscape are swallowed whole. It is called “the vine that ate the South” and the name is not much of an exaggeration.
Kudzu is a climbing, twisting perennial vine native to Asia and a member of the pea family. It has broad leaves divided into three leaflets, thick roots and fragrant purple blossoms that appear in late summer.
In favorable conditions, its vines can grow as much as a foot in a single day and stretch dozens of feet in one season. Wherever a stem touches the earth, it may form new roots, allowing one patch to advance like an army that builds reinforcements as it marches. Yet kudzu did not sneak into Appalachia unnoticed — we invited it.
The plant was introduced to the United States at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where Japan created a garden filled with unfamiliar ornamental plants. Americans admired kudzu’s large leaves and sweet-smelling flowers and nurseries soon began selling it as a porch vine. By the early twentieth century, it was also promoted as inexpensive forage for livestock.
Its great opportunity came during the 1930s. Generations of logging and intensive farming had left parts of the South badly eroded. Rain carried precious topsoil down bare hillsides, carving gullies into exhausted farms. Federal conservation officials believed kudzu offered an answer. It grew rapidly, tolerated poor ground, added nitrogen to the soil and appeared capable of holding wounded hillsides together. The Soil Erosion Service, later known as the Soil Conservation Service, distributed roughly 85 million kudzu plants to Southern landowners. Farmers were offered as much as $8 an acre to plant it. Civilian Conservation Corps crews placed it along roads, railways and eroding slopes. By 1946, kudzu had been planted on approximately three million acres. For a time, it was celebrated as a miracle vine.
The same qualities that made kudzu attractive made it dangerous. The warm, wet summers of the South gave it nearly a perfect home. Abandoned farms, highway cuts, utility quarters and forest edges offered sunlight and disturbed ground.
As rural land was deserted and regular grazing declined, many kudzu patches were simply left alone. Free from the natural controls found in its native range, the vine escaped cultivation and began claiming the countryside for itself.
By the 1950s, the government had stopped recommending kudzu as a cover crop. In 1970, the U.S. Department of Agriculture listed it as a weed, and it was later placed on the federal noxious weed list. The savior of the southern soil had become one of its most infamous invaders.
Kudzu does not usually kill a mature tree all at once; it conquers it slowly. Vines climb trunks and spread across crowns, forming a heavy green roof above the leaves. Starved of sunlight, the tree can no longer make enough food to sustain itself. Saplings, shrubs and native plants beneath the canopy fare even worse. The vine’s weight can bend young trees and break branches, while its dense growth reduces the variety of plants and wildlife habitat below.
Controlling kudzu requires persistence. Cutting it once accomplishes little because its root crowns can send up new growth. Repeated mowing, grazing, careful herbicide treatment or the complete removal of root crowns may be necessary for years.
Even then, the vine waits for one missed season and reaches again toward the light. Across flatter regions of the South, kudzu can often be reached more easily by mowers, grazing livestock and spraying equipment, but on Appalachia’s steep, rugged mountainsides, machinery cannot safely follow, leaving the vine to climb unchecked over slopes where few hands can reach it.
This is the curse of the kudzu, a beautiful killer that softens ruined buildings into mysterious green monuments and turns roadside debris into sculpture, yet its beauty depends on concealment. Beneath the emerald sea may stand an apple tree that no longer bears, a farmhouse no one remembers or a forest slowly being denied the sun. Kudzu came to Appalachia carrying a promise that nature could be commanded to repair what people had damaged. Instead, it became a warning across our hillsides. We asked one plant to heal the land quickly and learned the cost. Now it drapes the pines like a funeral cloth and chokes the very landscape it came to save.
Brittany Breeding
Appalachian Bluebird
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