C
ity leaders in Tallahassee, Florida, recently started a programthat uses sheep to graze on large, troublesome patches of kudzu within the city. Several summers ago, Greenville, SouthCarolina, hosted the filming and theatrical debut of “Kudzula,”the story of a ten-year-old boy who saves a town from over-development with the help of a forty-foot kudzu creature.
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As these incidentssuggest, the story of kudzu is a “tale of two vines.” Existing simultaneously in therealms of nature and culture, kudzu—like southern culture in general—is opento multiple interpretations and representations. In Tallahassee, kudzu is a pest.Like visiting relatives, the plant has overstayed its welcome. In Greenville, on theother hand, people not only pay $19 to watch a play about kudzu, but in that play,kudzu saves the day.Perhaps no other part of the natural environment is more closely identified with the South than this invasive and fast growing vine. Yet relatively few aca-demics have examined kudzu and its place within southern culture and the larger American experience. And southerners both endure and embrace this pervasivepart of life. Some wage an ecological battle against kudzu, while others use andmarket the vine in creative ways. Both southerners and nonsoutherners identify with kudzu as a symbol and incorporate the plant into daily cultural expression,including the language used to characterize and understand social and environ-mental change. As a national news wire reports, “So aggressive is kudzu that the word has entered American English as shorthand for out-of-control growth.”
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Inthis respect, the plant illustrates the tremendous impact the American South hasmade, and continues to make, on national culture. While kudzu may seem native to the South, it is an exotic species alien to theregion and the country. The plant was introduced to America from Japan in 1876at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and to the South in 1883 at the New Orleans Exposition. For the next few decades, kudzu served primarily as orna-mental shade for homes, particularly porches. Later, despite early warnings about the vine’s aggressive nature, the Department of Agriculture, the Soil Conserva-tion Service, and other government agencies promoted kudzu as a public re-source. Kudzu is comparable nutritionally to alfalfa and was first touted as a formof pasturage for feeding livestock—although cutting, handling, and baling the vine proved to be problematic. Kudzu reached the height of its popularity in thelate 1930s as a tool in soil conservation, a means of replenishing nitrogen-poorsoils and controlling erosion along fields and road banks. Historian Kurt Kin-bacher has characterized the story of kudzu as “tangled” in the sense that the vinedoes not have just one historical role or identity in the region. Its value to humanshas shifted with public opinion, advancements in science, and the changing de-mands of American agriculture.


As it turns out Kudzu is actually taking over forests across the American South. What happens is the vine actually devours the majority of the tree. You can see this stuff everywhere in Georgia.