(This blog will make a lot more sense if you read this blog of mine first: Monthly Blog Theme Proposal)
Also known as "The Vine that Ate the South"...this horrendous horrible life-sucking force of nature does not exist outside a particular area.I was from that area.
I am originally from kudzu-free New Jersey and when we moved to Alabama twenty years ago, we came from Springfield, Virginia...a place which also doesn't have the viral vine.
On the trip down from DC, once we hit a certain zone, these strange miraculous shapes were growing up telephone poles...they looked like abstract elephants...with their long trunks dangling and swaying in the breeze. They looked...utterly awesome.
I had never seen these things and really didn't pay them any mind...and when we bought the house I live in, I didn't know what those things looked like up close. As such, I was also totally oblivious to their cannibalistic ways.
Had I known...well, I would have turned tail and ran.
You here in the South know all about kudzu...you can stand outside (if you are prone to doing that kind of thing) and watch that vine grow. And it pulls down everything in its path, chokes the ever-loving life out of every living thing it grows over; it's like a chlorophyll Superman...but has no known kryptonite. Once it takes root you can't kill it short of arming yourself with an arsenal of pesticide and a lifetime of devotion.
Word has it someone brought it over from Japan, where it is controllable, as the plant dies down in winter all the way to the root system. But here in the South...well, it's much warmer than Japan and altho it will die back...the root system is alive, taking hold and spreading like a cancerous lesion. Yes, it doesn't die all the way back - and the powers that be decided it would be great at erosion control. Not only does kudzu not control erosion, I'm sure the South is paying millions every single year unsuccessfully "eradicating" this menace from the sides of highways where it was originally planted.
Elephantine it is...and it has grown to mammoth proportions.
Unfortunately, you guessed it -- it is also in my yard and barring someone making a better mousetrap or a way to economically desalinize water -- like a cure for that cancer...nothing has really been invented to literally nip this thing in the bud.
While it has been grown to make a concoction to curtail alcoholism (it has properties which will make you extremely sick if you drink alcohol after ingesting it)...and you can use it for other things, I see no one beating down my door to pay me good money to grow it.
Consequently, I have to pay good money to try to get rid of it...and it's a bear of a problem and nothing seems to put it in permanent hibernation.
Yes, I'm afraid "Nature's Little Murderer" is here to stay in the South and everyone who has run across this killer...can't stop grizzling about it.
