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>Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles. Bored children traveling rural highways insist their parents wake them w
by 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 agoPines, telephone poles, tractors, abandoned cars. There was a hill in Pinson, AL covered with the stuff.
- echelon 3y agoHere'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 agoI 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 agoWe 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 agoI 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 agoIs 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 agoKudzu 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.