When our son and his family lived in the Chattanooga area of Tennessee we traveled by car to see them every summer.
On our way through Tennessee we were amazed to see kudzu growing everywhere. It is a very fast growing vine that seems poised to take over Georgia, the Carolina’s and parts of Tennessee.
In Georgia they say, “ya gotta close your windows at night to keep it outta the house”
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Kudzu was brought to the United States in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Japanese government constructed a beautiful garden filled with plants from their country.
The large leaves and sweet-smelling blooms of kudzu captured the imagination of American gardeners who used the plant for ornamental purposes.
Kudzu was promoted for erosion control during the 1930’s. Farmers were actually paid by the government to plant fields of kudzu vines in the 1940s.
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The pant has become such a pest in the southeast it was declared a weed in 1972 by the USDA. The pesky plant covers over seven million acres of the southeast!
After eighteen years of research it was found that many herbicides little effect on Kudzu and one was found to make Kudzu even grow better.
Eradication procedure recommends repeated herbicide treatments for at least four years, but some kudzu plants may take as long as ten years to kill, even with the most effective herbicides.
The vine of the hardy, fast growing Kudzu can engulf an abandoned vehicle, house, barn or even a grove of trees in a single season once a good root base has been established. It often damages or even kills large trees by blocking needed sunlight.
Kudzu grows better in the southeastern United States than it does in its native lands. The climate is better and its natural insect enemies were not brought to this country with it.
