7 ms·

Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015)

133 points by buttocks 3y ago

cafard 3y ago
There are places in Washington, DC, and its suburbs where the kudzu can be quite dense.
Nicholas_C 3y ago
>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University. This was my experience as a child. We'd drive by groups of huge pines completely engulfed by kudzu and my mother would tell me it grew so fast you could see it grow with your own eyes. Scary stuff, I imagined the entire country overtaken by kudzu someday.
- uncletaco 3y ago
  Pines, telephone poles, tractors, abandoned cars. There was a hill in Pinson, AL covered with the stuff.
- echelon 3y ago
  Here's some Kudzu that persisted for about 15 years until they recently widened the road. It killed a bunch of trees: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,323.44h,90.73t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sMJ2q97Z8Z6eV18oCkLOwug!2e0!5s20190701T000000!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,3... This stuff is all over Georgia.
- jschlesser 3y ago
  I grew up in Oxford, MS. circa 1980. Kudzu didn’t blanket the roadside landscape at that time. It does now. Every time I go back, it is the blanket over everything. I love the flowery language of the article (takes me back a bit), but it really has overtaken the landscape. If you grew up there, you know.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  We had a lot of it in Maryland. I moved to New York, about 30 years ago, and stopped seeing it. Until a couple of years ago. A house in our neighborhood had a backyard covered in it. Not sure if it was deliberately planted. I reported it to the DEC, and it seems to be gone, now.
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    I love the DEC so much. They seem to actually give a shit, and NY's environmental recovery is astounding. A parallel to that is the incredible research and work done by SUNY ESF. They've almost brought back the American Chestnut!
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Is that the genetically engineered one? I just planted three of the Chinese Chestnut backcrossess (7 generations, so it's almost entirely American Chestnut).
- hnmullany 3y ago
  Kudzu does well at forest edges, so you tend to see it by roads - it's not successful in the interior where seedlings don't get enough light.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    >> As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade. Last time this article came up, I realized how much of my impression of kudzu was visibility bias. You see a ton of it from roads. You see very little of it inside forests, where there are not roads.
sarchertech 3y ago
The kudzu bug invasion was unreal. I used to live about half an hour from the Atlanta airport where they came in. One summer there were suddenly swarms of them around my house. Anytime you went outside, you’d get a few on you. The next year the swarms disappeared, but if you shake any given kudzu vine, several will fall off. It’s like they were buzzing around looking for the kudzu. Then once they found it they stayed put.
- echelon 3y ago
  That was about a decade ago, wasn't it? It was crazy. If you walked outside, you'd have two or three of them crawling on you by the time you walked back in. They'd find their way into your house, your car - you'd breathe them in if you weren't careful. I still don't understand what happened. They were a brand new / invasive species, but their initial surge was biblical in proportions - a "swarms of locust"-like plague. In the years that followed, the population dropped to the point you would only see them if you looked. Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe. The only similar event I can recall were the swarms of Japanese beetles (false June Bugs) in the 90's. Those were so bad that if you shook any standing tree, a thousand of them would drop on your head. But that only happened every seven years or so. Perhaps they're all periodic, like cicadas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas
  - brazzy 3y ago
    >Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe. Isn't that obvious? It's a species specialized to feed on one plant, and it met a huge amount of that plant which was previously undisturbed by its preying. The result is explosive, actually exponential growth, until there are more beetles than the plant stock can support. Then the beetle population collapses, and after that an equilibrium develops. Cyclical variations can develop under certain circumstances, especially when there are strong seasons.
    - culi 3y ago
      It is not at all specialized on a single plant. It seems to like almost any leguminous plant. The reason it's considered invasive is because of the large variety of commercially important crops it also feeds on like cowpeas, soy beans, green beans, etc. Kudzu, wisteria, etc are not as commercially important but also are eaten
_heimdall 3y ago
The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me. When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?
- Conan_Kudo 3y ago
  Yes. Certainly the First Nations have generally agreed on this.
  - RunSet 3y ago
    Have the Zeroth Nations weighed in or did none of them survive the First Nations' arrival?
    - courgette 3y ago
      From a country freaking out about its borders a handful of centuries after completed the largest land grab in history…
      - _heimdall 3y ago
        From a country freaking out about it's borders while holding onto the symbol of the Statue of Liberty... > Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
        Mountain_Skies 3y ago
        A poem attached to the pedestal is neither a legal document nor a statement from the creator of the statue nor was the country asked if that poem was in line with their values. It's one person's personal viewpoint that got amplified by a small group of people with its placement. Not sure why you think it's some kind of "Gotcha!" or founding statement of the country's mission.
ratsnake 3y ago
Interesting, but the thing that bugs me about the article is the photo at the top - That ain't kudzu. It looks more like an invasive honeysuckle.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I don't think it's a photo.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    It's by Laura Plageman: "Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010, archival pigment print, editions variable" https://photolp.com/project/response-land https://photolp.com/project/response-land It's not exactly a photograph, but it's not a painting either.
    - 100721 3y ago
      It looks like these works are prints that have been crumpled and/or torn, then photographed? Some of these are very neat
pinewurst 3y ago
(2015)
Lammy 3y ago
> Kudzu has appeared larger than life because it’s most aggressive when planted along road cuts and railroad embankments Here's a good example from the Hiwassee Loop where the Kudzu is all dead, making the actual vines easier to spot. Check out how it blankets the entire side of the mountain when the drone pulls out at 8m30s, still opaque even with zero leaves: https://youtu.be/5V3oHAtfh3M?t=411 https://youtu.be/5V3oHAtfh3M?t=411
ggm 3y ago
Lantana, Cactus and Cats Claw in Australia. Everyone talks about the cane toads but ignores the weeds
- defrost 3y ago
  Try telling people that Kookaburras are an introduced species gone feral and responsible for killing off large numbers of unique native birds, reptiles and insects. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-questions-after-bush-king-spotted-in-esperance/12578196 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-quest... . . . and you wonder why we close our borders to easties .. :-)
cjohnson318 3y ago
> a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou. Gumbo and jambalaya are hardly inscrutable, these dishes came straight out of West Africa. Bayou and Yazoo, like Ouachita, Natchez, Natchitoches, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee etc. are all from First Nations.
- adregan 3y ago
  I believe this is referring to the sound of these words out of the mouth of a southerner. For example, have a southerner attempt to talk about kudzu to a group in Japan and they’ll have no idea what he is saying (I know this from first hand experience). Same with these other words—the vowels change and slide and are inscrutable (hard to understand) to those whom the words are native.
unending_ 3y ago
[dead]
psychphysic 3y ago
Is this the same Kudzu as the supposed anti-alcohol-binge herb?
paulcole 3y ago
Remember the snakehead, the introduced fish that would decimate native fish populations here in the US? That, uh, turned out to be not true as well. They’re coexisting quite peacefully with native fish.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
digitalsin 3y ago
As a teenager I once had a summer job as a land surveyor in North Carolina. We saw this stuff all over the place, acre after acre on many jobsites that were deep in the woods or very rural areas. I think this article is underestimating how much kudzu actually has taken over.
l72 3y ago
The first time I had ever heard of kudzu was when I first installed Linux (maybe redhat 5 around '98), and it's installer tool was called Kudzu. Red Hat being out of North Carolina also has a ton of kudzu. It wasn't until several years later when I took a job that relocated me to Alabama that I saw it first hand on the roadways and really understood it.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
tl;dr: an invasive beetle began infesting kudzu in 2009 and has set it back. It's no longer a major invasive thread.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
[dead]

133 points by buttocks 3y ago

There are places in Washington, DC, and its suburbs where the kudzu can be quite dense.

>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them when they near the green kudzu monsters stalking the roadside. “If you based it on what you saw on the road, you’d say, dang, this is everywhere,” said Nancy Loewenstein, an invasive plants specialist with Auburn University. This was my experience as a child. We'd drive by groups of huge pines completely engulfed by kudzu and my mother would tell me it grew so fast you could see it grow with your own eyes. Scary stuff, I imagined the entire country overtaken by kudzu someday.

uncletaco 3y ago
Pines, telephone poles, tractors, abandoned cars. There was a hill in Pinson, AL covered with the stuff.
echelon 3y ago
Here's some Kudzu that persisted for about 15 years until they recently widened the road. It killed a bunch of trees: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,323.44h,90.73t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sMJ2q97Z8Z6eV18oCkLOwug!2e0!5s20190701T000000!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0630131,-84.6891383,3a,75y,3... This stuff is all over Georgia.
jschlesser 3y ago
I grew up in Oxford, MS. circa 1980. Kudzu didn’t blanket the roadside landscape at that time. It does now. Every time I go back, it is the blanket over everything. I love the flowery language of the article (takes me back a bit), but it really has overtaken the landscape. If you grew up there, you know.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
We had a lot of it in Maryland. I moved to New York, about 30 years ago, and stopped seeing it. Until a couple of years ago. A house in our neighborhood had a backyard covered in it. Not sure if it was deliberately planted. I reported it to the DEC, and it seems to be gone, now.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  I love the DEC so much. They seem to actually give a shit, and NY's environmental recovery is astounding. A parallel to that is the incredible research and work done by SUNY ESF. They've almost brought back the American Chestnut!
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Is that the genetically engineered one? I just planted three of the Chinese Chestnut backcrossess (7 generations, so it's almost entirely American Chestnut).
hnmullany 3y ago
Kudzu does well at forest edges, so you tend to see it by roads - it's not successful in the interior where seedlings don't get enough light.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  >> As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade. Last time this article came up, I realized how much of my impression of kudzu was visibility bias. You see a ton of it from roads. You see very little of it inside forests, where there are not roads.

sarchertech 3y ago

The kudzu bug invasion was unreal. I used to live about half an hour from the Atlanta airport where they came in. One summer there were suddenly swarms of them around my house. Anytime you went outside, you’d get a few on you. The next year the swarms disappeared, but if you shake any given kudzu vine, several will fall off. It’s like they were buzzing around looking for the kudzu. Then once they found it they stayed put.

echelon 3y ago
That was about a decade ago, wasn't it? It was crazy. If you walked outside, you'd have two or three of them crawling on you by the time you walked back in. They'd find their way into your house, your car - you'd breathe them in if you weren't careful. I still don't understand what happened. They were a brand new / invasive species, but their initial surge was biblical in proportions - a "swarms of locust"-like plague. In the years that followed, the population dropped to the point you would only see them if you looked. Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe. The only similar event I can recall were the swarms of Japanese beetles (false June Bugs) in the 90's. Those were so bad that if you shook any standing tree, a thousand of them would drop on your head. But that only happened every seven years or so. Perhaps they're all periodic, like cicadas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas
- brazzy 3y ago
  >Somehow an equilibrium was reached. I'm not exactly sure why the first year was so severe. Isn't that obvious? It's a species specialized to feed on one plant, and it met a huge amount of that plant which was previously undisturbed by its preying. The result is explosive, actually exponential growth, until there are more beetles than the plant stock can support. Then the beetle population collapses, and after that an equilibrium develops. Cyclical variations can develop under certain circumstances, especially when there are strong seasons.
  - culi 3y ago
    It is not at all specialized on a single plant. It seems to like almost any leguminous plant. The reason it's considered invasive is because of the large variety of commercially important crops it also feeds on like cowpeas, soy beans, green beans, etc. Kudzu, wisteria, etc are not as commercially important but also are eaten

_heimdall 3y ago

The whole concept of "invasive species" had always been a bit confusing to me. When does a plant or animal brought here from overseas start being considered native? Kudzu has been growing in America since before my ancestors can't here, am I still considered invasive based on the history of Europeans invading this continent?

Conan_Kudo 3y ago
Yes. Certainly the First Nations have generally agreed on this.
- RunSet 3y ago
  Have the Zeroth Nations weighed in or did none of them survive the First Nations' arrival?
  - courgette 3y ago
    From a country freaking out about its borders a handful of centuries after completed the largest land grab in history…
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      From a country freaking out about it's borders while holding onto the symbol of the Statue of Liberty... > Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
      - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
        A poem attached to the pedestal is neither a legal document nor a statement from the creator of the statue nor was the country asked if that poem was in line with their values. It's one person's personal viewpoint that got amplified by a small group of people with its placement. Not sure why you think it's some kind of "Gotcha!" or founding statement of the country's mission.

ratsnake 3y ago

Interesting, but the thing that bugs me about the article is the photo at the top - That ain't kudzu. It looks more like an invasive honeysuckle.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I don't think it's a photo.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  It's by Laura Plageman: "Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010, archival pigment print, editions variable" https://photolp.com/project/response-land https://photolp.com/project/response-land It's not exactly a photograph, but it's not a painting either.
  - 100721 3y ago
    It looks like these works are prints that have been crumpled and/or torn, then photographed? Some of these are very neat

pinewurst 3y ago

(2015)

Lammy 3y ago

> Kudzu has appeared larger than life because it’s most aggressive when planted along road cuts and railroad embankments Here's a good example from the Hiwassee Loop where the Kudzu is all dead, making the actual vines easier to spot. Check out how it blankets the entire side of the mountain when the drone pulls out at 8m30s, still opaque even with zero leaves: https://youtu.be/5V3oHAtfh3M?t=411 https://youtu.be/5V3oHAtfh3M?t=411

ggm 3y ago

Lantana, Cactus and Cats Claw in Australia. Everyone talks about the cane toads but ignores the weeds

defrost 3y ago
Try telling people that Kookaburras are an introduced species gone feral and responsible for killing off large numbers of unique native birds, reptiles and insects. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-questions-after-bush-king-spotted-in-esperance/12578196 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/kookaburra-cull-quest... . . . and you wonder why we close our borders to easties .. :-)

cjohnson318 3y ago

> a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou. Gumbo and jambalaya are hardly inscrutable, these dishes came straight out of West Africa. Bayou and Yazoo, like Ouachita, Natchez, Natchitoches, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee etc. are all from First Nations.

adregan 3y ago
I believe this is referring to the sound of these words out of the mouth of a southerner. For example, have a southerner attempt to talk about kudzu to a group in Japan and they’ll have no idea what he is saying (I know this from first hand experience). Same with these other words—the vowels change and slide and are inscrutable (hard to understand) to those whom the words are native.

unending_ 3y ago

[dead]

psychphysic 3y ago

Is this the same Kudzu as the supposed anti-alcohol-binge herb?

paulcole 3y ago

Remember the snakehead, the introduced fish that would decimate native fish populations here in the US? That, uh, turned out to be not true as well. They’re coexisting quite peacefully with native fish.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

digitalsin 3y ago

As a teenager I once had a summer job as a land surveyor in North Carolina. We saw this stuff all over the place, acre after acre on many jobsites that were deep in the woods or very rural areas. I think this article is underestimating how much kudzu actually has taken over.

l72 3y ago

The first time I had ever heard of kudzu was when I first installed Linux (maybe redhat 5 around '98), and it's installer tool was called Kudzu. Red Hat being out of North Carolina also has a ton of kudzu. It wasn't until several years later when I took a job that relocated me to Alabama that I saw it first hand on the roadways and really understood it.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

tl;dr: an invasive beetle began infesting kudzu in 2009 and has set it back. It's no longer a major invasive thread.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

[dead]