This week, I’ll be untangling vines.
The climbing plants have become an almost otherworldly Southern feature. They are seen draped along roadsides in sunny areas, sprawling across wood lines and creeping over railroad tracks.
Kudzu is one of these notorious vines, and during this time of year its flowers smell of grapes, attracting local pollinators. Bees are often found collecting pollen from the flowering vines, and they produce purple-colored honey from it.
Coral Honeysuckle is an S.C. native vine.
Glen Payne/Provided
Besides providing a curious shade for pollinators, Kudzu is notably a non-native invasive vine with many uses.
A few practical uses from times gone by include as a food source in the making of flour, as a fiber in the manufacturing of paper, as a forageable food for livestock, and as a prominent stabilizer for soil erosion control along steep roads and railway banks.
Kudzu has also been the subject matter of writers from the South. There’s the poem “Kudzu” by James Dickey. “Kudzu: A Southern Musical” has even toured the country and been around as a comic strip since 1981. In the 1940s, Channing Cope, a columnist of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, started The Kudzu Club of America. A local bakery in Mount Pleasant also uses the kudzu name, attributing to this invasive vine’s popularity.
However, besides being an invasive species, there are many threats brought on by the kudzu vine.
Poison ivy on a tree at Cypress Gardens in Moncks Corner.
Glen Payne/Provided
One involves a certain pest that is taking its toll all across the South.
In 2009, the kudzu beetle was first discovered around the Hartsfield–Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. And now the insects can be found in states ranging from Mississippi to Maryland. In South Carolina, these tiny stink bugs are found reducing kudzu vines to little more than any other roadside weed that you pass on your travels.
Keep in mind that the real danger of kudzu is not that it ate the South; it is its potential to hide much more aggressive, invasive plants — such as cogon grass and wax-leafed Ligustrum — beneath, something we’d find if we peered beyond the ever-present kudzu.