Midnight Mutterings | Kudzu: The plant that ate the south

Not quite sure what made me start thinking about Kudzu lately. Maybe it’s all the new bad news about plastic. Kudzu might be the plastic of the plant world in that it originally seemed to be so useful, so benign, such a cheap, great idea, that it was only much later that the ‘What have we done?’ emerged. Why Kudzu was not a problem in Japan and other far east lands is a mystery to me. Perhaps the climate, the soil, the density of the populations or a combination of factors meant Kudzu never became to menace in the far east that it did when it was imported to the southeast USA, where it became the monster it was on foreign soil.

Click here: 

https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/forestry-wildlife/the-history-and-use-of-kudzu-in-the-southeastern-united-states/

to read more than you wanted to know and see some pix of what Kudzu looked like in it’s prime.

Kudzu isn’t of much interest to anyone in the Pacific Northwest as it doesn’t seem to grow well here and therefore hasn’t been useful or harmful factor in our lives. For those reasons, we can thank our good luck and go back to worrying about plastic.

My personal relationship with kudzu developed in my earliest childhood when I was totally unaware of its origin or impact until it was already a fact of life.

Before my birth, my father, an engineer, pilot and builder by nature and education bought seventy acres of secondary pine forests land outside of Raleigh, North Carolina for $50 an acre. After the end of the World War II, he returned from his federal service of running a power plant on the Cape Fear River, and driving to Raleigh once a week to teach aeronautical engineering at what was then N.C. State College, to that seventy acres, along with a wife and four children, of which I was youngest. He had already cleared some land in the center, built a house and three vehicle garage, cleared and fenced acres of pasture, and built six miles of power and telephone lines to connect with the Capital City of Raleigh.

That acreage is where I first became mildly aware of my circumstances after leaving the tiny village on the Cape Fear River I wrote about in my bio here. After his return he built a couple of lakes and docks and boats for them That’s where I learned to swim in a hurry as there was no shallow water. Occasionally, the lake froze in the winter, and once my brother and I fell through. He was able to drag us out, but we knew better than to return to the house wet from our forbidden adventures. My brother built a fire and we dried our clothes while we shivered naked until we could return in dryish clothes to the house. Our two older sisters were too sophisticated to be involved in such childish pranks.

At some point before or after the family returned to the outskirts of Raleigh, Kudzu was planted. I don’t know exactly when or the circumstances and there is no one alive to ask. All I recall is that by 1950 or so, the clear part of that acreage had been overwhelmed with Kudzu, which more than thrived in the heat and humidity of the southeast. I think my father planted it on purpose. He was always interested in erosion control and other ecological conditions to take care of the land. By that time he had also built other houses and large sheds, barns and even a clay tennis court that never held a tennis game as it was quickly overwhelmed by Kudzu. Somehow the houses were spared as were the pastures. The horse, ponies and several cows, steers and one small bull, probably helped keep the pastures clear. Maybe the houses were too shaded to be fodder for the kudzu. However, the hundred grapevines he planted so they grew overhead were fair game. (My father preferred to not bend over for harvest and I was too short to reach the grapes. I had to stand on the pony to graze the grapes, and the Kudzu was almost as tall as the pony who hated the whole process of getting through the tangled Kudzu vines and leaves.) There was an open shed just up the hill from the house that sheltered an airplane tow tractor (which was our only tractor as there were no row crops that required plowing. My father used it for clearing and building ponds and lakes and it was the vehicle I learned to drive on.) The Kudzu simply covered that shed where my father built a 30 ft. cabin cruiser (which eventually made it to Nags Head on the outer banks on the Atlantic Ocean). The Kudzu essentially hid that shed to the extent that my mother was unaware of the building of the boat and felt it had been kept a secret from her. She didn’t mind the boat, just the perceived secrecy.

So Kudzu was a big part of my early life. The homestead is still there and one of my sisters and her extended family live there now. Much of the land was sold decades ago after my father died at age 96 in 2000, and is now a development. I haven’t been there in more than a decade and don’t know if it is still a Kudzu kingdom or it the invasive weed is under control. There are other houses now on the land that remains. My architect nephew lives there and could fill me in if I asked him. Or maybe I’ll go to see for myself. It’s been a while.

Note: I make it sound like my father built all that stuff by himself, which seems impossible. However I am unaware of anyone helping with any of it except for my brother who reluctantly assisted him when he couldn’t get out of it. He did work on the cars, which could be fixed at home, unlike cars of today. Eventually, I was my brother’s equally reluctant helper, which meant I would find myself lying under a car, holding something in place with a screwdriver while he went to get ‘something he needed.’ That meant he likely drove six miles to town in another car while I stayed under the car, afraid to let go in case something would fall on me, until he returned an hour or so later.

My father did use a lot of mechanical advantage in his work which he provided for himself and he had a fully equipped shop for wood and metal working. He also sewed up and set bones for injured dogs and horses and the kids (until we learned not to disclose our injuries to him for that reason). He set his own fingers after he dropped a pump on his left hand and they healed perfectly. When he injured his back, he built his own traction, which, apparently, worked fine. All this time he had full time jobs with a lot of responsibility, eventually in administration for the state of North Carolina. There was constant pressure for him to run for state office, but he preferred his privacy, saying he could get a lot more done by working quietly on the sidelines. (I was a little offended that we didn’t get to live in the ‘big’ city in the Governor’s Mansion, but our family would have been a terrible fit for public life.) My father who didn’t waste any time smoking or drinking, was very quiet. The few things he did say were usually devastatingly funny. He did teach me to read before I was four in that little village, but after that he assumed (somewhat wrongly) we’d do fine on our own without much supervision. Still, we were fine enough in the ways a new friend described yesterday as ‘not dead or in prison’. I didn’t live geographically near my family after age fifteen, but when my son was maybe three, we were visiting at Nags Head where there aren’t many sticks lying on the beach. My young son mentioned he ‘needed’ a sword. My father immediately crafted a gorgeous hand carved wooden sword with hilt and all the trimmings and presented it to Jay who said, ‘I guess Granddaddy doesn’t know about two sticks and a rubber band.’ I’m not sure what that has to do with Kudzu, those were two times my father overbuilt.