If you’ve ever traveled the highways or backroads of the South, you doubtlessly encountered kudzu. This fast-growing vine was officially designated as a “noxious weed” by the U.S. government in 1998. Several varieties of the genus Pueraria are identified as kudzu, and the plant goes by names like Japanese arrowroot or Chinese arrowroot in its native regions of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and some Pacific Islands.
Kudzu is decidedly not native to the United States, which is a big part of why it has been designated noxious. Originally imported as a tool to prevent soil erosion and replenish nutrients to farmers’ fields, kudzu quickly outgrew any boundaries set around it thanks to the plant’s astonishing ability to grow by as much as a foot a day. Stories abound of Southerners leaving on a two-week vacation, only to return to discover the vines had overrun their cars.
This rapid growth is complicated by the fact that the plant reproduces by sending out runners from nodes on its roots to reach out and create completely new plants, leading to webs of vines that are difficult, if not impossible, to clear using traditional means. Kudzu is highly resistant to most herbicides, requiring multiple applications that can harm other desired foliage in the area. Of course, most of the plants surrounding the growth of kudzu are usually starved of light by the thick tangle of vines, so they’re not long for this world anyway.
If you were an alien trying to design the most invasive plant possible as a way to take over Earth, kudzu would be a pretty good starting point.
Still, some Southerners have a certain affection for kudzu as a symbol of the region, and while it can be found growing in 32 states, it is primarily a Southeastern phenomenon. So, if we just have to live with it, we might as well know a little bit more about our persistent neighbor. Pour a glass of sweet tea, sharpen your garden pruners and learn some fun facts about “the vine that ate the South.”
You can blame Philadelphia for the spread of this scourge.
In 1876, the City of Brotherly Love celebrated the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by hosting the Centennial International Exposition, the first World’s Fair ever staged in the United States. Ten million people attended the Centennial Exposition, and 37 countries participated with pavilions showcasing their cultures, Industries, and products.
Consumer products that were first introduced to the public at the event included Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone, Thomas Edison’s automatic telegraph system, the typewriter as well as new food products such as popcorn, Heinz ketchup, and root beer.
Over in the Japanese Pavilion, the horticultural exhibit displayed an ornamental vine named Japanese arrowroot. Visitors took to the pretty little plant with its purple flowers, unaware they had just met the equivalent of Audrey 2 in “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Kudzu was introduced to the South at the 1883 New Orleans Exposition, where it was marketed as lovely foliage to grow on trellises to shade porches on hot summer days and as an inexpensive food source for domestic cattle foraging in pastures. By the early 1900’s, kudzu was available in seed catalogs.
The U.S. Government actually encouraged planting kudzu all over the South.
As a result of the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930’s, soil erosion had become a significant problem in the warmer sections of the United States. What rain did fall would rapidly wash away topsoil, leaving fields unplantable and the already tenable food supply even less sustainable.
To combat this erosion, federal conservation services advocated planting kudzu to create a matrix of vines to help hold topsoil in place. They also hoped that the vines would return nitrogen to the soil, which had been stripped away by bad farming practices in the days before crop rotation became the norm.
To encourage the spread of kudzu, the Soil Erosion Service distributed more than 80 million seedlings to Southern landowners and encouraged them to plant their fields with arrowroot. As a further incentive, the Civilian Conservation Corp planted more kudzu around the region as part of a New Deal initiative and offered farmers $8 an acre to do the same.
“Kudzu Clubs” sprouted up across the region to glorify the vine with festivals that crowned kudzu queens, and by the mid-1940’s kudzu clubs boasted more than 20,000 members with an avowed goal of planting almost ten million of acres of the South in kudzu.
By the 1950s, farmers and ecologists began to realize the problem they had created with this invasive vine, but fortunately, only a tenth of their planting goal had been achieved. Still, the battle rages on.
The plant’s name is basically a typo.
The Japanese word for arrowroot is kuzu, but somewhere along the way, someone added an extra “d” into the middle of the word. That’s OK. It makes it sound more quaintly Southern anyway.
Kudzu smells like Kool-Aid.
While most of us probably drive right past 50-foot-tall walls of kudzu with our windows rolled up and the a/c blasting to combat the heat of summer, if you actually walk up to a patch of the vines you might notice that the flowers of the plant have a familiar aroma when they bloom from July through September. The bright floral scent reminds many people of grapes, and the plant’s oils are used to make soaps and candles to take advantage of kudzu’s innate perfume. Although the broad dark leaves of kudzu often cause people to mistake it for native grape vines like muscadine, kudzu is actually in the pea family.
You might even spot some purplish-hued honey at local farm stands near where the plant grows rampant. Bee experts posit that pollen from kudzu flowers gives this honey its distinct color, and some people can detect a little bit of that grape character in the honey.
Kudzu has all sorts of beneficial uses.
Besides gift shop fragrance novelty items and naturally-flavored honey, kudzu actually has a myriad of useful applications, both crafty and medicinal. It really is helpful at combating soil erosion and replacing spent nitrogen in the fields, providing you can control its aggressive growth. (Hint: you probably can’t!) Farm animals do like the taste of kudzu and can forage on it even after the first frost of the year. After that, kudzu makes a fairly nutritious hay, although the dense vines are difficult to bale.
The tough, fibrous vines are excellent for weaving, and basket makers have employed kudzu vines for decades to create their wares. The fibers can also be broken down into cellulose-like wood to make paper or even clothing, although not as efficiently as other alternatives. Scientists are also investigating whether the plant’s cellulose can be employed in ethanol fuel production.
Kudzu has been an important component in traditional Asian folk medicine. Chinese herbalists count it among the 50 essential plants with therapeutic properties, and kudzu powder is used in Japan to brew an herbal tea to help with minor maladies like headaches.
See? It’s not all bad!
There’s actually a “Kudzu League” that rivals the Ivy League.
While the Northeast is proud of its eight elite universities with their ivy-covered walls, there is an informal confederation of Southern colleges that sometimes are jokingly referred to as “The Kudzu League.” Including notable private institutions like Vanderbilt, Duke, Rice, Wake Forest, Washington & Lee, Tulane, and Emory, along with public universities such as University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, and Georgia Tech, Southerners will hold these colleges up against the best of our friends to the north.
They say it’s important to know your enemy, and “forewarned is forearmed.” So, if you find yourself in a battle against a stand of Pueraria Montana (aka kudzu) threatening to overtake your North 40 (or car… or home…), at least you might now have a fighting chance!
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