Southerners Once Hated Kudzu but It Grew on Them

Once it was feared and reviled as the “weed” that was swallowing the South.

Now, Southerners are learning to live with and love--and even to laugh at--the kudzu plant.

Kudzu, a prolific, fast-growing leafy vine, was originally introduced to this region from Japan. It was widely planted during the 1930s in an effort to control soil erosion but the effort went awry when kudzu, which can grow as fast as a foot a day, proved impossible to stop.

Kudzu (pronounced KUD-zoo) has been spreading across Dixie ever since, covering millions of acres with its lush green foliage and engulfing anything in its path: trees, telephone poles, abandoned shacks, even automobiles and railroad cars.

“It’ll even smother you if you stand around long enough,” a Georgia state highway maintenance chief once remarked.

Fought Losing Battle

For years the South has fought a losing battle against kudzu. At last, unable to lick it, Southerners increasingly have decided to join it, overlooking its vices and finding all sorts of virtues.

This mill town of 10,500 residents in the kudzu-covered South Carolina Piedmont is a case in point, embracing what would have once seemed rank heresy.

Each year since 1979, the townspeople here have put on a kudzu festival. The four-day event opens with a kudzu-ribbon-cutting ceremony and features a Miss Kudzu beauty pageant, a kudzu Olympics, a kudzu crafts fair and a kudzu float contest.

One year there was even a kudzu cooking demonstration, with such items as marinated kudzu blossoms and kudzu leaf chips introduced to wary palates.

Along with such light-hearted honors, kudzu is gaining a great deal of serious respect. In the South’s scientific community researchers now are experimenting with new ways to use it. At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, for example, studies have been made on turning kudzu leaves and vines into ethanol fuel and using kudzu roots as a starch source.

‘Rich in B Vitamins’

“Kudzu roots are a good source of starch, very rich in B vitamins. As a fuel, kudzu’s usable but, unfortunately, it’s not very economical,” said Robert Tanner, a Vanderbilt chemical engineer.

The University of Mississippi’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of Southern Culture says kudzu first was introduced to the United States at the Japanese pavilion during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.

Now, even the Japanese have gained a deeper appreciation of Southern kudzu. In Japan, kudzu root starch is used to make a powder to thicken soups and to make tofu, a bland, custard-like dish. Kudzu is no longer abundant in Japan and some Japanese entrepreneurs see the South’s estimated 6 million acres of kudzu as a horn of plenty.

“Tofu made out of kudzu sells for 10 times what tofu made out of soybean sells for in Japan,” said J. H. Tinga, a University of Georgia horticulturist and kudzu specialist who has been approached by Japanese about the idea. “I say let’s take all those Toyotas off those big ships and send the boats back loaded with kudzu.”

More Use by Artists

Another big boost to kudzu’s esteem comes from the increasing number of Southern artists and craftspeople who employ it.

Carol Stangler, an Atlanta basket weaver, started using kudzu vines about five years ago and now fashions them into wreaths and baskets that sell for as much as $225 apiece. In a more whimsical vein, she also makes kudzu “snakes” out of foot-long lengths of serpentine kudzu vines that she paints with bands of colorful acrylics.

“Kudzu has become a metaphor for the region,” says Doug Marlette, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Constitution who, in a sign of the new times, chose the name “Kudzu” for his nationally syndicated daily comic strip dealing with the South.

“You can’t kill it. It has an indomitable spirit, like Scarlett O’Hara, or Dilsey in Faulkner’s works. Like the South, kudzu keeps rising and rising.”

Problems With Cooking

Not all of the new kudzu crazes are entirely promising, however.

For more than a decade, Fred Gabrielson, a University of Alabama biologist, has taught a mini-course called “Local Flora” that includes kudzu among other edible wild plants that students study and learn to cook with.

“All of the kudzu recipes we’ve tried have turned out to be dismal failures,” he said. “The underside of the plant leaf is hairy and it tends to taste like cotton--even in a quiche.”

However, Edith Edwards of Rutherford County, N.C., a kudzu chef who travels across the South showing off kudzu’s culinary virtues, says Gabrielson’s students probably neglected to pre-wash the leaves to improve kudzu’s flavor.

One of her favorite recipes is for kudzu chips: young kudzu leaves dipped in tempura batter and deep-fried until golden brown.

“They taste like a rich potato chip,” says her husband, Henry, a retired dairy farmer.

Beautiful in Summer

In summer, kudzu is exotically beautiful, with its cascades of bright green leaves and clusters of purple blossoms that emit a grape-like fragrance. But it is a downright eyesore after its leaves drop out in the fall and ugly thatches of dried-up vines are left exposed until the plant comes back to life the next summer.

Even worse, any living thing that kudzu covers--such as a tree or a shrub--is eventually killed because kudzu’s dense blanket of leaves blocks out sunlight.

In a 1976 documentary film, James Dickey, the Southern poet and author of the novel “Deliverance,” described kudzu as a “vegetable form of cancer.”

Until the Depression, kudzu was most commonly used in the South as an ornamental shade plant to screen porches and arbors.

Short summers and cold winters north of the Mason-Dixon Line prevented kudzu’s spread there. But in the South, with its steamy summer climate and mild winters, kudzu flourished--only too well.

No Artificial Nutrients

As a means of controlling soil erosion, kudzu is superb: It grows fast, requires no artificial nutrients, lives on little water and shoots out a deep network of thick roots--one of the reasons it also is hard to eradicate. Between the early 1930s and 1945, half a million acres of kudzu had been planted to revive barren land.

But kudzu refused to remain in the rain-ravaged gullies and eroded cotton fields where it was planted. Resistant to most herbicides, it spread all over the place.

In its climb from reproach to respectability in recent years, kudzu has given its name to a Southern rock band and has been the subject of a cult film, “Kurse of the Kudzu Kreature.”

In “The Book of Kudzu,” the kudzu lover’s bible, authors William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi declare that “like it or not kudzu has become as much a part of the South as Mardi Gras and mint juleps.”

In Chattanooga for the last six years, a group of residents has staged a Kudzu Ball on the same night that Chattanooga’s elite holds its glittering Cotton Ball.

At last year’s Cotton Ball, the queen was a millionaire’s daughter who wore a gown made of silver lace splashed with silver sequins and aurora stones. Her cloak was 12 1/2 feet long.

At the Kudzu Ball, by contrast, the queen was a 49-year-old Roman Catholic nun who was dressed in a Minnie Pearl outfit with a burlap queen’s robe around her shoulders.

Champagne flowed at the Cotton Ball; the Kudzu Ball served a greenish liquid labeled “kudzu drippings wine cooler.”

“There’s a thin line between classiness and trashiness,” says Dalton Roberts, a prominent Chattanooga politician who shunned the cotton cotillion last year for the kudzu bash, “and one of the delights in life is trying to walk that line.”

Researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.