Of Vines and Villains

The story goes that kudzu — native to Japan and parts of China — arrived on America’s doorstep in 1876, exhibited at the Japanese pavilion of the World’s Fair Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. For several subsequent decades, it was mainly used in the U.S. as a pretty, decorative plant to display on porches and provide shade. 

During the Depression and in the wake of the Dust Bowl, the New Deal brought about the formation of the Soil Erosion Service, later the Soil Conservation Service, which encouraged farmers to plant kudzu for erosion control. Encouraged is putting it lightly. The nascent agency paid farmers up to $8 an acre to grow it — almost $200 in today’s dollars. 

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government grew 70 million kudzu seedlings. Initially, this booming business was perceived as a cause for celebration. There were kudzu clubs, festivals, pageants, and parades. 

Years later, those kudzu pageants would inspire Mimi Herman to write her 2023 novel, The Kudzu Queen, inspired by an old article she stumbled upon about the men who made it “their life’s work to promote kudzu and having these big festivals and pageants. I was just stunned by it,” she said. 

Herman began to think about the element of snake oil salesmanship that must have gone into peddling kudzu to the masses — like something straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. And she was onto something. 

After all, money alone might not have so fully convinced farmers to go full kudzu. 

The swift and all-in adoption of this non-native plant required kudzu preachers and a big pulpit. And the most prominent kudzu hype man of them all was Channing Cope, a Covington, Georgia-born journalist and radio host who earned the dubious title of “Father of Kudzu” in the 1940s. 

Cope was no stranger to a dramatic declaration in his weekly column in The Atlanta Constitution (now The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), such as, “kudzu is the Lord’s indulgent gift to Georgians.” His headlines weren’t subtle, either. In “Let Kudzu Send Baby to College,” he imagined the riches that would come to anyone who began planting kudzu the moment their child exited the womb.

A 1949 Time magazine piece about Cope opens with a fascinating scene at the crack of dawn on his 700-acre Yellow River Farm. Cope “downed a cup of coffee laced with bourbon, pulled on a shapeless seersucker suit, and started reading aloud to warm up his vocal cords.”

He also founded the Kudzu Club of America, which, at its zenith, had 20,000 members. 

But Cope himself didn’t have any illusions about how quickly kudzu would start scaling small buildings in a single bound. He acknowledged that upfront in his Front Porch Farmer, published in 1949, in a chapter entitled “The Miracle Vine”: “For some reason, possibly the fact that the vine will run up on trees and telephone wires and take over yards … there has arisen a great prejudice against kudzu.”

But what those detractors don’t understand, he carefully explains, is that one must make sacrifices for the sake of the greater good. Comparing the plight of a Southern farmer trying to fight erosion to that of a physician treating a patient with malaria, Cope reasons, the doctor “does not prescribe warm baths and massage and manicures and hairdos and soft music. He produces his arsenic and quinine and atabrine and his frightening hypodermic needle and goes to work. He fights fire with fire. He meets a specific disease with a specific cure.”

In other words, kudzu for crumbling soil is just like a hearty dose of arsenic for a feverish patient. Good for what ails.

In that chapter, there’s a photo taken at Cope’s farm in which he’s in the center of a gaggle of men, all wearing the same kind of white, broad-brimmed hat, all waist-deep in a field of kudzu — presumably gazing out at a sort of agrarian manifest destiny.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the soil erosion folks realized their mistake, but I hope one day we’ll get a movie about that haunting moment, complete with a tense score of violins and a sweeping zoom in on the one character who, like a USDA Cassandra, had already warned us of the billowing trenches of green to come. What you can trace is how, after lots of back-and-forthing in the ’50s and ’60s, the USDA officially designated kudzu a common weed in the South in 1970, thus entering the virulent-hatred phase of the 20th century’s latter half. 

In recent years, however, kudzu is once again getting a bit of a reappraisal — or, at least, an acknowledgment that there’s much more to the plant, its uses, and its history than it gets credit for. 

For author Mimi Herman, it’s about finding a middle point between the extremes: “For something that can be seen as malevolent or seen as a savior, what I’m always trying to look underneath and understand — what is it really?”

In Western North Carolina, the nonprofit Kudzu Culture is working to bring about greater public awareness of how to make practical use of kudzu for food, fiber, art, and more. Its vision is to create “a world where a widespread culture of kudzu use and reverence balances kudzu in native ecosystems of the Southeast while providing major material and economic benefits for communities amidst a rapidly changing world.”

The organization’s executive director and co-founder, Lauren “LB” Bacchus, is a fiber artist whose work, primarily experimental papermaking, incorporates materials found in the natural world around her. Looking back at where things went wrong with kudzu, she points out that while the U.S. government was giving out kudzu seedlings like candy during the Depression, they failed to prepare anyone with how to work with it.

“What wasn’t taught by the federal government was mostly the deeper cultural knowledge known by the Chinese and Japanese. And cultural practices are relevant,” Bacchus said. “When we don’t have the full scope of knowledge in the first place and then in the second place, when that sliver of diminished knowledge is lost, everything becomes all out of whack.”

After all, for centuries in Asia, kudzu has been used for food, for fibrous material to make cloth, for medicinal purposes, and even to grind and make starch. Bacchus is an “accidental expert” of the history and uses of kudzu, and uses that research in her educational and community outreach efforts, having taught at UNC-Asheville, the Asheville Art Museum, and elsewhere as a visiting artist. 

And Kudzu Culture is not alone. As if mirroring the steadfast proliferation of kudzu itself, there are artists, chefs, nonprofits, and volunteer groups all across the Southeast that are approaching the green expanse in new ways — leveraging it for sustenance, delight, and even exploring its use as a metaphor.

As the accepted wisdom goes — if you want to know about people and their environment, check out what they’re eating. 

New Orleans-born chef Mimi Maumus first encountered kudzu when she moved to Georgia for college and found the vine to be an oddly whimsical assassin. “It’s killing things, but it’s the most beautiful death ever. It reminded me of looking at clouds,” she said. “I always thought that Coca-Cola needs to make a commercial with that bear coming out of the kudzu.”

She loved gazing into the verdant abyss but didn’t think much of it for many years until her professional culinary life began to bring her toward bold new experiments with foraged food. As owner and chef at the Athens, Georgia, restaurant home.made, which focuses on original dishes created from ingredients tied to the local environment, a crazy thought popped into her head one day about what she might do with kudzu in the kitchen.

In the 10 years since her experimentation with the plant started, she discovered that the young leaves are yummy when fried, braised, or baked but won’t make a top-notch salad anytime soon. “It’s so fibrous; it doesn’t break down like collards do. Collards are tender enough to eat raw, but kudzu is not. It’s a little woodier,” she said. Instead, the leaves can make for a good component of bigger dishes, like roasted vegetable medleys, where the leaves play in concert with other textures and flavors like squash, okra, potatoes, or boiled peanuts.

But what she loves more than any other part of the kudzu plant are the flowers, a pint of which will yield a quart and a half of the sweet, almost grapelike kudzu simple syrup — which she turns into a seasonal drink called Electric Kool-Aid.

It’s a lemonadelike beverage that gifts drinkers with a dazzling color change from purple to pink, brought about by basic chemistry. Adding citrus to kudzu syrup and watching it transform, which Maumus said her 10-year-old daughter loves, feels like a science experiment.

“When that happened, I was hooked,” she said. “Because not only is it superregional and an unusual ingredient, but it does that. At that point, I just wanted to do all kinds of things with kudzu.”

Sometimes when you’re foraging, though, you come away covered with a “significant amount” of kudzu beetles, which get all up in the leaves. “And they might be edible, too,” Maumus joked. “You get protein with your greens.” (To be clear, the rigorous cleaning, straining, and cooking process eliminates any fraction of the possibility of that happening.)

Brewing kudzu tea or making powder from the taproot are on Maumus’ list of possibilities in the future. Meanwhile, collecting kudzu from her backyard or farms that want to get rid of it won’t necessarily “make a dent in it,” she said. “Now, if Coca-Cola would take my bear commercial idea, I bet it would help a lot.”

Coca-Cola may not have stepped up to the plate yet, but there’s at least one gutsy group that has. Far beyond the backyard and local-farm harvests that give Maumus the fodder to craft new recipes, there are those who are making more than just a dent in the kudzu overgrowth around them. All by way of a little old-fashioned persistence and elbow grease. 

An hour south of Asheville, in the Carolina foothills town of Tryon, North Carolina, famous as the birthplace of Nina Simone, you’ll find the Kudzu Warriors, a group of ardent nature enthusiasts who spend two hours every Monday morning embarking on the at-times Sisyphean task of paring down kudzu’s overgrowth from the surprisingly steep mountainsides of Norman Wilder Forest. 

As the vines lie dormant in the winter months, it’s easier to get in there and dig up the “crowns,” cutting kudzu’s life source off where it matters. On this cool but sunny early spring day, Pam Torlina, Community Engagement Director at Conserving Carolina, assembles a group of about 20 and helps distribute the clippers, trowels, and other tools they’ll be using once we book it up the side of Little Warrior Mountain. 

We’re headed to a section of land the group has been steadily hustling to clear before spring starts bringing back the green overgrowth, buds shooting out like zombies crawling out of their graves. 

Some, like the EcoForesters who came down from Asheville, are there to learn techniques to bring back to their regular jobs. Some are there because they hate kudzu. Some of them are there for pure camaraderie and exercise.

One such person there for a variety of reasons is AmeriCorps Fellow Max Bisaha, who brings a kudzu tincture (basically bitters) to the group hangout at the Tryon Coffeehouse Co-op afterward. One of Bisaha’s friends made it from the tuber, and there aren’t many takers. Bisaha has gotten into basket-making with kudzu and said if he finds a good vine on these Warrior missions, he’ll coil it up and bring it back. 

“Not that we’re going to weave out the kudzu problem, but it’s helpful,” he said. 

One of the die-hard Warriors, also on the board of directors for Conserving Carolina, is Shuford “Ford” Smith, who served as a school psychologist for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System earlier in his life, assisting with desegregation during the 1970s. He also spent more than a decade full-time tent-camping public lands across North America while photographing and writing about the continuing impact of European settlers. 

A fast talker and a congenial welcomer for all newbies like myself, Smith describes the land as we hike upward. He moved to the Tryon area in the mid-’90s and has lived here longer than anywhere else.

A good chunk of that time was in retirement — a time Ford cherishes because it gave him some good final years with his late wife, who died of a rare form of lung cancer. As a tribute to her, Smith has recently been planting chestnut trees in the area, 20 in total when I talked with him back in March, with more at home waiting to germinate.

As we continue to veer off the trail in the first 20 minutes of our excursion, ankles straining, Smith points to various spots that might, to the uninitiated eye, look like a random assortment of sprouts and trees, and shares their history.

Now, walking almost straight uphill, Torlina points to some areas where there’s new growth thanks to that bit of light and space they’ve carved out for other plants to survive. We’re standing on a stretch of 185 acres of nature preserve in the North Pacolet River Valley that Conserving Carolina acquired in the 1990s.

Although many of the volunteers she’s spoken with grew up fearing accidentally stepping on snakes while traipsing through the waist-high green kudzu, Torlina says that’s not a risk. Because kudzu is a monoculture, nothing survives beneath it — and with no prey, there’s no reason for snakes to hang around. The only animals that tend to linger around the kudzu are woodchucks and occasionally swallow-tailed skippers, whose caterpillars feed on legumes and eat the kudzu leaves, though not nearly enough to impede the vines from advancing.

After more than a decade of return trips, the group has begun to witness some wildlife in areas they’ve cleared. They’ve seen deer returning and even encountered a turkey sitting on its nest under a bush. If folks do happen to spy a snake, “that’s only because the habitat is improving,” Torlina said.

It can be challenging work, like gardening as extreme sport: Your knees caked in soil, your muscles straining, your back hunched. 

“You can’t just sit back when you’ve got kudzu living around you,” said Torlina, who has helped lead these workdays with the Kudzu Warriors since 2011. 

When we reach the summit, where we’ll be working for the morning, Ford Smith proudly shares his all-time record for the biggest “bounty” in a single morning: 100 crown heads in one stretch. He advises everyone not to mess with anyone else’s bounty as we work.

Another Warrior veteran, Don Dicey, is up toward the top of the group’s perch, cutting the vines and rolling them like a human hay baler to pull into an oversize bale. Windrowing the vines “is the best way, so if there is any plant life below [the kudzu], we ensure that it doesn’t get pulled up,” he said.

As someone who’s regularly volunteered with the Warriors for about seven years, it’s a numbers game to Dicey. The more vines they can pull up, the less photosynthesis on the part of the kudzu, which slows it down. By springtime, walking through the deep overgrowth is near impossible, much less while contending with ticks. 

Even though progress is slow, over his years with the group, Dicey has seen gradual diminishment of the kudzu. Unfortunately, some of the native plant life that returns is poison ivy, but then there are other sprouts here and there. When they see that happening, they’ll usually move on to the next spot.

“It’s a lovely transition to watch. We find turtles; we find the little dusky salamanders; we find snakes. They weren’t there before. That’s an indicator to me,” Dicey said. “They have a reason to be here.”

That statement makes me think of another moment on the hillside when Ford Smith became effervescent with delight at spotting a trillium sprout that had poked its head into the sunlight. 

“They’re just waiting for this stupid layer of kudzu to be gone,” he said. It’s this small but meaningful injection of hope that keeps him going, he said, as he carefully cleared off the area around the little infant bloom.

The good/evil dynamics that played out among various plants scattered across the Southern landscape is something that long captivated artist Aaron McIntosh. A fourth-generation quilter now living in Montreal, Canada, McIntosh grew up in the tiny Eastern Tennessee town of Gray, between Kingsport and Johnson City — population less than 1,500.

McIntosh remembers looking out at expanses of kudzu as a child and thinking how oddly magical it was, the way it curled over everything. “I remember feeling like it was something that you could have pulled out of the Muppets. It’s big and chunky and round, pointy and spikey.”

Years later, in 2013, he had another realization about kudzu as he was spending time in Roanoke, Virginia, helping to clear out the overgrown garden of his maternal grandmother, who was dying. 

As they worked, McIntosh listened to the way his family talked about the plants they were clearing, and suddenly it clicked how similar the language used to describe these hated vines was to what he had heard and felt while growing up as a queer kid in his small rural town. 

“They all had this rhetoric about weeds, and it hit me like lightning, like, oh my gosh, I am a weed in this landscape, you know, being queer and from this region,” he said. “So I just landed on this thing of, I’m just like these weeds, you know, I’m here, doing my thing, growing, being happy, and it’s human culture that decides what we’re going to cultivate or suppress and eradicate.”

Following that revelation, McIntosh went about designing an art project that combined his childhood fascination with kudzu with the mission to better document the Southern LGBTQ+ experience — and the feelings of alienation or otherness that often go with it. The result was his multistate, years-long art project, Invasive Queer Kudzu, which “uses queer kudzu as a symbol of visibility, strength, and tenacity in the face of presumed ‘unwantedness.’”

He traveled around the country collecting firsthand stories and oral histories (or floral histories, if you will) on the Southern queer experience in bookshops, coffee shops, community centers, gay-straight alliances in high schools, and even church groups. 

He digitally printed 45 different prompts on fabric cut in the shapes of kudzu leaves, along with blank leaves at the request of participants, and invited folks to write their answers down — and use more leaves if needed. Once he’d collected them all, McIntosh would stitch them together on one long vine. Every event was a separate vine. 

Some of the most popular prompts included: “Tell me a story about how you have thrived in the South,” “How do you do your gender?”, “Is there a story from your life when someone called you unnatural?”, “What’s your funniest story of being gay in the South?”, and “How did you come out?” “I remember someone wrote about coming out to their dad at Bojangles. That’s classic,” he said. 

Then there was a prompt inviting allies to share a message with their LGBTQ+ friends. 

Pride events always yielded an abundant harvest of tales, sometimes 300 to 400 leaves in one trip — or as many as 932 during Pride in Washington, D.C. 

The project launched in 2015, when McIntosh was living in Baltimore, and continued for about five years until the pandemic, when he had to hit pause. In that time, he gathered 7,240 leaves. And, just like the kudzu, the project may be dormant right now, but it’s not dead — he hopes to pick it back up when the time is right. 

Another aspect of kudzu that everyone who works with it — or against it — will acknowledge is how free and easy to access it is. It’s that abundance that for years has fed the artistry of Nancy Basket. Based in Walhalla, South Carolina, just across the Georgia line near Lake Hartwell, Basket has been working with kudzu in seemingly limitless ways — from looming sculptures to weaving on a loom to papermaking to basket weaving. 

Throughout her house, creations adorn all sides of the walls, including tapestries, finely woven cloths that she made on a loom, and even chandeliers dangling from the ceiling. But the first thing that catches your eye when you turn right into her parlor is an enormous dangling sculpture of the Uktena, a dragonlike winged serpent from Cherokee legend. 

The Uktena is 8 feet long and took about a year to make, all woven with kudzu. Its sharp, monstrous teeth are flint knapped stones. It also has motion-sensor eyes that blink when you walk in — although Basket acknowledges she needs to change the batteries. 

Basket, 70, relocated from the Northwest to South Carolina in 1989, eventually settling in her current abode in the mid-’90s. Drawn since she was a little kid to working with materials found outside in the natural world, the first time she tried making a basket with kudzu, it fell apart in a matter of days. 

“I went back and apologized to the kudzu and said, ‘I’m from up North, I go too fast. I’m going to stay here until you tell me how you want to be used,’” she said, then clarified with a smile, “I don’t usually talk to plants.” But after what you could call some plant whispering, she began to master the medium and has become a well-known kudzu aficionado throughout the South. 

A mother of six, Basket has been bringing her art to life for 40 years, driven by the desire to “show people how they can use what grows in their yard.” 

She takes me down through her garden, where there are strawberries and a little pond, and then back toward the ravine where there’s a swath of kudzu growing. “I don’t even have to farm kudzu. It just grows up; it comes in the front door, ‘I’m here, it’s time,’” she said. 

The ravine sits behind her small art studio, built 100 years ago as a barn and retrofitted with bales of kudzu. There’s a small loft for taking naps after long work hours, a papermaking station, chairs for sitting down and making baskets, and art everywhere you look. 

She points to a patch of English ivy out behind the studio and notes how that, too, is an invasive species. And yet people in the U.S. tend to think of it as charming or sophisticated — after all, what comes to mind with “Ivy League” if not expensive, fancy, and prestigious? But not all invasive species have such great PR. 

“You can’t go wrong. This is one of the easiest plants to work with. It’s fed my family in many ways,” she says as she splits a vine like a piece of string cheese. 

It’s extremely bendable, and together we work on a small, rudimentary basket, which she quickly notes doesn’t “need to be neat and tidy.” 

Andrew McCall, another free-form artist, sits stationed on the porch of Priester’s Pecans off I-65 about half an hour southwest of Montgomery, Alabama. Most Friday and Saturday mornings, you’ll find the 72-year-old demonstrating his craft to passing shoppers and selling a wide range of pieces, including birdhouses and wreaths. His signature work, though, is elegant, twisting kudzu baskets. (Not one to waste a foraging trip, he also makes baskets out of wisteria.) 

McCall employs a flowing technique that he describes as “dancing with the vines” — letting them lead the way as he loops one over another, eventually listening to his gut on when the project is ready. “I don’t force it; I follow it. I let the basket go where it wants to go,” he said. 

Occasionally, he’ll use a hammer and small nail to ensure that the ending of one of the vine loops stays anchored in place. As people walk by, they’ll sometimes ask what kind of wood he’s using. When he tells them it’s not wood, it’s kudzu, they’ll balk and sometimes protest. McCall always chuckles and keeps working. 

As he points out, the nice thing about working with kudzu is that there’s no shortage of it, and it’s free for the taking. As he drives down the road, he often gets distracted by a patch of kudzu and returns to collect it. His white truck bed is in a perpetual state of overflowing with vines. “I have to stop sometimes; I get carried away,” he said, pointing to his truck and laughing, “They say never go to the grocery store when you’re hungry.” 

But when it comes to practicing his art, McCall is almost always hungry. After more than four decades of this work, the father of five, grandfather of seven, and great-grandfather of one can still remember how dark things got before he found his calling. After entering the Marines as a young man, which he loved because it let him travel around the world, McCall said he came home and struggled for years to find a career to support himself and his wife, Etta, and their growing family. 

“I was in a bad place,” he said. “It was whatever I could get up to do to survive.” That included working in a brick factory and a chicken slaughterhouse. Finally, he got the opportunity to try making a wreath out of grapevine and realized he was good at it. But even then, it took years to convince shops to sell his work. 

Along the way, as he built his business from scratch, his family helped — his kids would help pull vines, and until recently, Etta made baskets with him. He’s been featured in numerous craft fairs and galleries and at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina. 

Over time, the shame that existed when he felt like he couldn’t figure out how to provide for his family has melted into pride and absolute comfort in his skin. “Now I’m happy with what I do,” he said. “My father always told me you ain’t got to run with the pack to be something.” 

In a way, he said, he loves kudzu because it allows him to go out, find something that would otherwise not turn any heads, and transform it into something sublime. The vines “don’t ask permission to grow. They just grow. So my perception is, I love it for what it gives me, not because it’s something good to look at. Because it’s good to work with; it’s soft. And you can do all kinds of crazy things with it.” 

That softness and malleability makes kudzu something that can easily change from an out-of-control menace that chokes all other plant life beneath it into something useful or even beautiful. And crafters’ dexterity is also a testament to how we’ve received kudzu over the years — first treating it as a curiosity, then as a savior, then a scourge, and now something, perhaps, somewhere in the middle. 

Kudzu’s complicated reputation, and how it has shifted over time, is a reminder, too, of how often we tend to avoid fully melding history with the present, selectively remembering some things but not others. And perhaps the solution to that is to concentrate on that in-between — of seeking out what something really is, as Mimi Herman put it. After all, there are so many things you can do with this pesky thing that won’t go away, so many possibilities in the undergrowth. As Kudzu Warrior Pam Torlina said, the worst we can do is continue to ignore it.

Alexis Hauk has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications, and national magazines, including TIME, The Atlantic, Atlanta magazine, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ArtsATL, Mental Floss, Washington City Paper, Uproxx, and more. An Atlanta native, Alexis spent a decade living in cities scattered across the U.S. (New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Los Angeles) before heeding the siren song to return to her place of origin in 2018. By day, she works in health communications. When not scribbling up a storm, she can be found obsessing over theater, comedy, film, animals (particularly cats and sharks), and travel. 

Amanda Greene was born in the mountains of Rabun County, Georgia, and raised in Atlanta. Her senior year of high school, she dropped out, took her GED, and moved to California to attend Art Center College of Design on a tip from her photography teacher. After honing her craft in Los Angeles for 12 years, Amanda moved back to the Georgia Piedmont. She’s a working photographer who shoots commercial and editorial work. She can light any scene, but is at her best driving backroads of the rural South looking for hints of beauty. Her first book, Rejoice, was published in 2019, followed by Peach, published in 2022 by Bitter Southerner Publishing.

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