Friday, November 30, 2007
A cave with a curtain of kudzu
I'd never heard of the kudzu vine before I moved to Georgia in 2001. But since then I've been fascinated by it. I did some quick research so I could appear knowledgeable about it: Originally introduced to the United States in 1876 by the Japanese Government as part of an ornamental garden display, kudzu is a vine with large leaves and sweet-smelling blooms. When American people first laid eyes on it, they thought it was wonderful and started introducing it into their gardens. The leaves are edible, the roots can be used as herbal medicines, and the blooms are an excellent source for honey. In the 1930s it was discovered that kudzu was also good for erosion control and its use was encouraged across the country. It was known as the "miracle vine," and farmers were paid $8 an acre to plant the kudzu vine in their fields.
There's only one snag: It grows too well. The climate here in the south east of the United States is perfect for kudzu. Apparently the vines can grow as much as a foot in one day during the summer. The vine climbs and smothers anything in its path, including power poles and houses, and there are long stretches of Interstate 75 where you see nothing but a lumpy green blanket of kudzu covering trees and hills alike. Kudzu was named in 1953 as a "pest weed," a menace that can kill trees over a number of years by blocking the sunlight. There are various poems and even short stories about the vine, and it seems to be depicted as a creepy, sinister monster that sneaks up on you when you're not watching and smothers you.
Sometimes known as the "the vine that ate the South," this leafy fiend does seem to get around, and if you're lucky (or unlucky) enough to inherit a property that's been overrun by the stuff, it can take ten years to kill it off properly. In the summer it's green and pretty; in the winter it's brown and ugly, a tangled mass of roots and tough stringy tentacles that clings relentlessly to whatever it claimed in the summer and refuses to let go even through the cold months when it's supposed to be asleep. You can hack away at it, you can dig up its roots, but if you miss a bit... then it springs up once more and spreads like wildfire. It certainly makes good subject matter for tales around the campfire, as the "plant that came to life"; even this short poem is a little sinister:
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass is tinged with green, even so...
— From the poem "Kudzu" by James Dickey
But however sinister it might be to some, and however much a pest it might be to others, I can't help looking at it and thinking, "An enchanted forest!" Whereas ivy crawls patiently and carefully up the side of a building, picking its way thoughtfully, kudzu defies gravity and just oozes up the side like some kind of sticky alien goo, intent on first smothering and then devouring the structure. Still, even at a foot a day, you never actually see it grow; all you see is a quiet, almost picturesque landscape — a serene scene of green.
I can't help wondering how much fun Enid Blyton would have had, if kudzu had been introduced to (and able to survive in) England of the 1940s. There are plenty of books in which characters make use of ivy to climb walls (a good example being Ragamuffin Jo in Five Fall Into Adventure), and plenty of other books where caves are hidden from passers-by thanks to a handy curtain of ivy. Just look at how kudzu could have been used in Blyton's world! Why, the little hidden house in The Treasure Hunters would have been a perfectly common, everyday problem had kudzu thrived in England during Blyton's career. How many young readers would have read about the hidden house and thought, "Golly, I wonder if there's a forgotten shed in our garden, under all that kudzu! There just might be!" And then many happy hours would have been spent crawling through the undergrowth, giving mothers a perfect reason to say, "Colin, you look like you crawled through a hedge backwards!"
There's a house just down the road from where I live that's lost forever to impenetrable foliage. (Well, maybe that's an exaggeration — but it is in a bad way.) I took a photo as I drove by, and it's worth noting that this was literally the day after the first frost of the season, about a month ago. Temperatures are normally 80 F and upwards through summer, reaching around 103 F this year, and in November we've had highs of around 67 F... but one night it plummeted to 32 F (freezing point to Celsius users) and, with a surprised gasp, the kudzu withered and expired.
Well, sort of. It'll reawaken in the spring, but on the day I took this photo you can see that most of it had turned brown, with a few remaining green bits around the top. Today as I write this, the kudzu is dead, brown and extremely ugly... but then, I find many trees and plants ugly during the winter. Come the Ides of March, the kudzu will reawaken. The Calends of April will bring showers, and then the Nones of May will bring sunshine and warmth... and the kudzu will once more turn into an enchanted forest. Hurrah!
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And Nigel, I should clarify that while I like to see kudzu, I definitely wouldn't want it near my own property! Or, if it was on my property, I'd like it confined to an area at the bottom of the garden, perhaps so I can make some kind of "secret garden" out of it by cutting a doorway through to beyond... but the words "kudzu" and "confined" don't really go together.
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