Kudzu: Maligned Vine

Kudzu is a semi-woody, perennial climbing vine in the pea family. How did it get its reputation for being an unkillable menace? And was it really introduced to stop erosion, only to get completely out of hand? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. I grew
up in the North Carolina Piedmont, and it was very
common when I was a kid driving around to see

(00:24):
these huge fields of kut zoos climbing all over everything
from fields to trees, to telephone polls to like abandoned
tobacco barns. And people talked about this plant almost like
it was a monster. Like it was. People called it
the vine that ate the South and described it as

(00:44):
being almost unkillable and also teeming with stinging, biting insects
and maybe venomous snakes and maybe even like murderers hiding
in there. It just sounded like the worst plant in
the world. Um. I also got the basic story worry
that they had introduced this plant to the United States
to stop erosion and it got completely out of control.

(01:08):
So the other day there was a random headline that
just took me down a train of thought to kut
zoo and I started wondering how much of that basic
story I heard as a kid it was really true,
And also who was they in this story, they introduced
kat Zoo, who specifically was that. Uh and that's how

(01:29):
we got this episode. Uh. So, for a little level
setting and what kut Zoo is. Kutzo is a semi woody,
perennial climbing vine. It's actually in the pea family. There
are at least fifteen different species in the genus pew Area,
and the one that's prevalent in the United States is
pew Area montana variety lobata, or just pew Area lobada.

(01:53):
Kutzo has hairy vines and trifoliate leaves, meaning that each
leaf is made up of three leaflets. So a glance,
young kudzu vines can resemble poison ivy. Boy have I
made that mistake before? Um? But poison ivy is glossier
and those hairs are roots that it uses to anchor
itself and climb surfaces, and cut Zoo, on the other hand,

(02:14):
climbs by twining around itself or around other objects. Cut
Zoo is also a flowering plant. It produces flowers for
the first time when it's about three years old, and
those flowers smell like grape candy. They're typically purple, but
they can also come in shades that are more red
or more pink, and these flowers form seed pods, but

(02:35):
most of the time only a couple of seeds in
each pod are viable. They can also take a really
long time to germinate, like years, so while it's possible
for people to collect and intentionally propagate these seeds, most
of kudzou spread comes from the plant sending out runners.
These runners form nodes roughly a foot apart, with a

(02:56):
new route forming it each node. This is a deciduous plants,
so it drops its leaves after the first hard frost
and it leaves this mat of brown vines behind. I
can't speak for anybody else, but when I was a child,
I thought kad zoo was actually pretty like relatively an
attractive plant in the green months. The rest of the

(03:18):
time not so much. That vine grows back in the spring, though,
and it thrives in places that have an average rainfall
of about forty or a hundred and one centimeters or more,
also with a long growing season and mild winters, and
that means that kud zoo is especially suited to places
that have a humid subtropical climate like the southeastern United States,

(03:42):
where it is a notoriously invasive plant, and parts of
Eastern and Southeastern Asia and nearby Pacific Islands, which are
its native region. Particularly in the United States, kad Zoo
has become most associated with Japan. In Japanese, it's known
as kuzoo, and sometimes it's also called Japanese arrowroot. It's

(04:02):
part of a group of traditionally admired plants known as
the Seven Herbs of Autumn. The first written reference to
kudzou in Japanese is a poem that dates back to
the year six hundred. The dictionary known as the wem
Yo Show, which was compiled during the Hayon period, describes
kudzoo leaves being eaten as a wild vegetable. Kudzoo has

(04:23):
been widely used all over its native region for all
kinds of purposes for millennia. Kazoo start acts as a thickener,
similar to phile, which is made from sassafras. Kudzoo starch
and kadzoo flower are also used to make other foods
like noodles and mochi, and to coat foods before frying them.

(04:44):
The leaves, the flowers, and the roots are all edible,
and bees can make kudzoo honey from the flowers. Kudzu
roots can be just enormous, and they've also been an
important food source during times of famine in Asia, in China, Japan,
in Korea, katzoo has also been used to make textiles,
separating out the plant's fiber and using it to weave cloth.

(05:07):
The oldest mention of this textile in writings is from
the work of Chinese philosopher Confucius in the fifth century
b c. Katzoo stems and vines have also been used
to make paper and to weave baskets for hundreds of
years or more. Various parts of the kadzoo plant are
also used extensively in traditional Chinese medicine. Kadzoo is an

(05:30):
ingredient in a t that has been used as a
treatment for alcohol abuse for more than a thousand years.
Doctors Wing Bing Chung and Bert L. Valley of Harvard
University studied this treatment in China, and they isolated an
active ingredient to test its effect on hamsters. Their work
was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of

(05:51):
Sciences in the nineteen nineties, and it suggested that this
substance was effective both at suppressing the appetite for alcohol
and end for helping to improve the function of alcohol
damaged organs. Subsequent research into the same basic thing has
also continued to be pretty promising. Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners

(06:12):
also used kazoo to treat high blood pressure, migraines, circulatory problems,
and pain. While traditional Chinese medicine is based on the
idea of balancing and supporting the flow of cheese through
the body, Western medical research has found that kazoo preparations
can contain high concentrations of flavonoids, which are antioxidants that

(06:32):
may have a physiological effect on all of those conditions.
The Japanese text Sai katsu Roku or Account of Processing
Kadzu Start, was written by Okura Nagatsune and illustrated by
our Saka Hokuba, who was a student of previous podcast
subject Katsushika Hokusai. This text was written in about eighteen

(06:55):
twenty eight, and its description of this plant nods to
something that later made kadzoo so popular in the United States.
It describes kud zoo as a quote useful thing in
useless places, because, in addition to all of these many
many uses we just discussed, it could grow in very

(07:15):
poor soil and on steep mountain slopes that couldn't really
be used for other purposes. Even in its native region,
kudzoo can grow over and damage other plants and built
structures if it is left unattended, but at the same time,
various other factors usually keep it from getting out of control.
There's competition from other plants that are also native to

(07:37):
the ecosystem. Various fungi and other pathogens that infect kudzoo
are endemic in Asia, but they just don't exist in
many other parts of the world. Researchers have also identified
dozens of insects species that feed on kudzoo in China
and Japan, eating the roots or leaves or sucking the
moisture from the stems. One of these is the Japanese

(07:58):
kudzoo bug, and that is going to come up again later.
Kad Zoo has been introduced to lots of places outside
of its native range. It's naturalized in parts of Central Asia,
Southern Africa, Central America, coastal Australia, and various Pacific and
Caribbean islands. Being naturalized means that it's able to reproduce

(08:20):
and sustain itself in these areas where it's been introduced
without the help of human beings. Invasive plants are a
subset of naturalized plants. Not only can they reproduce and
sustain themselves without people's help, but they also have the
potential to cause economic or ecological damage. Not all naturalized
plants are invasive, but all invasive plants are naturalized. The

(08:44):
International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed kaudzoo
as one of the one hundred worst invasive species in
the world, but the i u c N also notes
there's one specific place where it's really a serious pest,
and that is in the southeastern United States. We will
get to how becausey was introduced to the southeastern US

(09:08):
after a quick sponsor break. One of the many popular
but ultimately questionable at best ideas that was floating around
in the nineteenth century was acclimatization. When we have talked

(09:28):
about this on the show before, it's been in the
context of colonists who were nostalgic for the flora and
fauna of home and then tried to introduce those species
into the places that they were then living, and uh,
this is often really not gone well at all. One
example from way back in the archive that's been a

(09:48):
Saturday classic a little more recently is British colonists in
Australia who missed having rabbits around, so they brought some
rabbits to Australia and that has been causing for problems
for more than a hundred and fifty years. But some
acclimatization proponents in the US looked at things more broadly.
They advocated bringing all kinds of plants and animals from

(10:11):
all around the world and introducing them for the sake
of quote improving what was available in North America after
the eighteen fifty three Perry Expedition forced Japan to start
trading with the West. This acclimatization movement included Japanese plants.
One major proponent of this was horticulturalist Thomas Hogg, who

(10:33):
served as US consul and Customs Service advisor in Japan
from eighteen sixty two to eighteen seventy four. Hogg sent
a lot of Japanese plants and seeds to his brother James,
who owned a nursery business, as well as to other
competing nursery owners. He wasn't just trying to help his
brother's business out. He also really thought it was important

(10:55):
to send these plants to the United States to get
them established. Hag was one of the people who introduced
to Japanese not weed, which is also considered invasive in
the US, to the United States. Thomas is not known
to have sent James any kudzoo samples, but the hogs
are an example of how there was already a lot

(11:17):
of interest in acquiring and growing Japanese plants in the
US in the late nineteenth century, part of a general
fascination with and eagerness for anything Japanese. So when kadzoo
was first showcased at the Japanese Garden Pavilion at the
eighteen seventy six Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, people were ready. At

(11:37):
this exhibition, kedzoo was shown primarily as an ornamental plant,
one that would provide fast growing shade along with beautiful,
fragrant flowers. Kudzoo made another appearance at the World Cotton
Centennial that was held in New Orleans starting in eighteen
eighty four. This was another World's Fair and it introduced

(11:59):
the kudzoo line some more people who were living in
the hot, humid South soon this plant had been nicknamed
porch vine, with people planting it around porches and courtyards
and training it up arbors and trellises to provide additional shade.
In the southeastern US, these newly planted porch vines could
grow up to a foot a day during warm, sunny weather,

(12:21):
or about sixty feet or eighteen meters over the course
of one growing season. I imagine sitting on your porch
and just watching it expand slowly. People were intentionally training
this growth up their portray links and onto trellis is,
rather than encouraging it to run along the ground, But
it still didn't take long for people to notice that

(12:42):
kad zoo could spread aggressively if they didn't keep it
cut back. One of the people who noticed kad zoo's
troublesome potential was David Fairchild, who worked for the U.
S d A. While working as a plant explorer in Japan,
he had seen kut zoo being used in pastures for
livestock to graze on, so he tried planting some around

(13:05):
his home in nineteen o two, not not just trailing
it up the porch, and he found that it quickly
became really overgrown and hard to manage. While Fairchild expressed
his concerns about the plant to the U. S. D A,
it wasn't until ninety eight that he published an account
of his experience in his book The World Was My Garden,
Travels of a Plant Explorer. That experience included spending more

(13:30):
than two hundred dollars trying to eradicate the kud zoo
on his property before eventually selling it, at which point
the new owner pasture a cow on it over an
entire summer. And that's like, that's like two hundred dollars
in nineteen thirties. Maney, Yeah, that is a significantgnificant expense. Uh.

(13:50):
And he did. Then he was like, I kind of
gave up. It's like, I'm just gonna sell this cows.
It's haunted with cut zoo. Meanwhile, in Florida, Charles and
Lily Please, we're also growing kut zoo. They had originally
planted it to provide shade, but then Charles had moved

(14:11):
some of it to another spot on their property. Soon
he noticed that their farm animals seemed to really like
to eat it, and also grew really quickly once it
was established, and the animals seemed to thrive on it.
So the Pleases established glenn Arden Nursery to sell the
seemingly miraculous forage plant. In Charles also wrote a pamphlet

(14:33):
called kud Zoo Coming Forage of the South. The Polices
started selling kud zoo through mail order, and before long
they faced an investigation for suspected mail fraud. The US
Postal Service doubted their claims the plant's heartiness and dramatic
growing speed. The Postal Inspector's doubts apparently disappeared after an

(14:54):
in person visit to their farm. In n seven, a
historical marker was erected on Highway nine be in Chipley, Florida.
I know where that is, commemorating the pleas development of
kud zoo as a commercial crop. IM one article that
I read when I was researching this claimed that people
from Georgia and Alabama will go down there to spit
on it. I mean, you know, people will do things

(15:18):
for many reasons. So as food for livestock, kudzoo really
was remarkable. When cut and bailed as hey, it could
be harvested twice or sometimes even three times in a season.
Animals could also graze directly on it in their pastures,

(15:39):
and nutritionally it was similar to alfalfa, although because it
had this woody, viney nous to it that just took
more work to harvest it and bail it. That additional
work and people's experiences with their overgrown porch vines made
a lot of farmers reluctant to try kud zoo as forage.
Though in many areas people only planted kut zoo in

(16:01):
places where the soil just would not support any other crop,
but in some areas there were special incentives. For example,
in ninety the Central of Georgia Railway gave out free
kudzoo plants to farmers. The idea was that they would
farm kutzoo hey, which they would then need to transport
by rail. Growing kut zoo as forage involved some built

(16:24):
in checks on the plant's growth. Farmers who grew kut
zoo to be used as hey, we're cutting it down
at least twice a season, and those who were planting
it in their grazing pastures actually had to make sure
their animals didn't graze on it too aggressively because over
grazing could kill it. So even as more people were
planting kutzoo, its reputation was still more mixed. The notorious

(16:48):
people mostly saw it as a valuable shade plant and
forage plant, but one that required some extra effort and attention.
By the nineteen teens, agricultural experiment stations on the Southeast
were also working with kad zoo, documenting how best to
propagate and care for it, measuring how it grew, and
studying how it impacted the soil. And through this research,

(17:11):
several things became clear. One was that katzoo took some
work to establish, but once a seedling had taken root,
it was hearty and grew very quickly. Another was that
it replenished some of the nutrients in the soil, and
a third was that its root system and vines could
stabilize top soil and reduce or even correct erosion. This

(17:33):
discovery is what really led to the proliferation of kad
zoo around the Southeast and the nineteen thirties, and we
will get to that after a sponsor break. The most
well known ecological disaster to strike the United States in

(17:54):
the nineteen thirties was the dust Bowl. The federal government
had forced into people's off of their land in the
Great Plains and then granted that land to homesteaders who
plowed under the native grasses in favor of planting crops
like wheat and corn. These farming methods were not appropriate
for this land or the climate at all. Irresponsible farming

(18:19):
practices combined with severe droughts and high winds, leading to huge,
destructive dust storms that stripped even more of the top
soil away. What's less well known today is that erosion
was also an enormous problem in the Southeastern United States.
The soil had been depleted through monocropping, especially with crops

(18:40):
like cotton and tobacco. Bowlwevil infestations, droughts, and the Great
Depression had all caused huge economic hardships for farmers, many
of whom abandoned their farms to try to find paying
work elsewhere. Much of the southeastern US is prone to
brief but intense thunderstorms in the spring and summer, which

(19:00):
washed away the top soil and left gullies behind. In
both the Dust Bowl States and in the Southeast, these
problems were directly connected to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, slavery,
and the forced displacement of indigenous peoples. The United States
Soil Erosion Service was established in nineteen thirty three as

(19:21):
part of the National Industrial Recovery Act. It was expanded
into the Soil Conservation Service under the Soil Conservation Act
of nineteen These services were both part of the New Deal,
that's the collection of projects, programs, and reforms that were
championed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the wake of
the Great Depression. The idea was not only to restore

(19:45):
the depleted soil and to reduce erosion, but also to
provide work through the Civilian Conservation Core and the Works
Progress Administration. The Soil Erosion Service and Soil Conservation Service
tried using various plants to con troll erosion. In the Southeast.
Kudzoo seem to have a lot of potential. Kudzoo can

(20:05):
grow in poor soil, and it has a symbiotic relationship
with nitrogen fixing bacteria and could replenish the nitrogen in
the soil. The plants broad leaves sheltered the soil from
heavy rain. Research at one Soil Conservation Service experiment station
found that soil under kudzoo had eight percent less water
runoff and less soil loss than soil that was under cotton.

(20:29):
Kut Zoo forms a really thick mat as it grows,
and those mats could trap sediment and that allowed the
plant to actually fill in gullies over time. Kudzoo can
also grow along steep gully walls where other plants really
could not. And then on top of all of that,
kudzoo that was being used for erosion control could also

(20:52):
be harvested for hay or used as grazing land as well.
Research at agricultural experiment stations also suggest it that covering
a field and kud zoo and then plowing it under
after a period of years could restore the soil and
improve future crop yields. Between nineteen thirty five and nineteen
forty two, the Soil Conservation Service raised one hundred million

(21:16):
kud zoo seedlings in nurseries in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama,
and Georgia. The US government offered an incentive of up
to eight dollars an acre to farmers who were planting
kud zoo to control erosion kudzoo could also prevent erosion
on highway and railroad cuts and embankments, so highway departments

(21:37):
and railroad companies were eligible for that incentive as well.
So the spread of kud zoo was also tied to
the proliferation of automobiles and the highways that were built
to accommodate them. The US Department of Agriculture also works
to assuage farmers fears about this plant. A J. Peters
Principle Agronomous wrote kud zoo a forage crop for the

(21:59):
South East in nineteen thirty two. This was distributed as U. S.
D A leaflet nine one, and it included this language
under the headline kut zoo not a pest, which I
it made me laugh out loud the first time I
read this headline quote. There is no danger that kad
zoo will become a pest. True, the growth, if uncontrolled,

(22:22):
will make a tangle of vines likely to smother bushes
and even small trees. But in fields, heavy grazing or
cutting at once reduces the stand and weakens the growth.
Hogs will eat the start roots and destroy a stand.
The few plants that remain can be readily killed by
digging them. By the late nineteen thirties, kudzoo had been

(22:45):
introduced to every state in the southeastern US. In nine R.
Y Bailey of the Soil Conservation Service wrote up a
thirty page booklet called Kudzoo for Erosion Control in the
Southeast with a slight lee revised edition being printed in
and that pamphlet walks through the need for a heavy

(23:06):
duty plant to control erosion and mitigate the effects of
quote overproduction of clean tilled cash crops. It included information
on how to plant and care for kud zoo on
different types of slopes and in different configurations, as well
as using it as part of a crop rotation to
replenish the nutrients in the soil. And this pamphlet once

(23:28):
again reiterated quote kud zoo is not a pest. There
is a rather prevalent belief that kud zoo is likely
to become a serious pest if planted in or near
cultivated crop land. Experience has shown that this belief is unfounded.
The habits of growth of kad zoo make its control
very simple. This plant grows only from buds at the

(23:50):
crowns and at the nodes of vines. There are no
buds on the roots below the crowns, nor the vines
between the nodes. New plants are established only by the
form of roots at the nodes of vines, which are
in contact with the ground. The growth made by these
roots during the first growing season is not sufficient to
make them difficult to break loose by a plow when

(24:11):
the land is broken the following spring. This brochure goes
on to say quote the question frequently arises as to
the possibility of kud zoo becoming a serious pest where
it is planted in areas adjoining woodland. The vines sometimes
cover a few trees along the border, but the damage
done to an established stand of trees is no more

(24:32):
serious than the effect of the trees on cultivated land.
Where a vigorous stand of kud zoo adjoins a plantation
of young trees, serious damage to the trees may result
unless steps are taken to prevent its spread into the trees.
Encroachment of kud zoo into woodland, either young or mature,
can be prevented by making one trip along the border

(24:53):
between the kud zoo and the trees three or four
times during each growing season with a drag harrow a
one horse spring tooth harrow, or with a plow to
drag the runners back from the trees. In some instances,
farm roads between kad zoo and woodland areas are used
as effective barriers between the two types of plantings. Before

(25:14):
World War Two, the United States had been getting most
of its kudzoo seedlings from Japan. As diplomatic relations between
the two countries started to crumble, the Soil Conservation Service
turned its attention to harvesting seeds and collecting cuttings to
transplant domestically, rather than importing them from Japan. In the

(25:35):
nineteen forties, one of the most vocal proponents of kudzoo
was Channing Cope of Georgia, who called kudzoo a miracle vine.
He had bought a seven hundred acre farm in n
seven and arranged it so that different pastures contained different
forage plants, and he could move his cattle from one
to the next as the seasons changed. Kudzoo was best

(25:57):
from May to October and also served as insurance against drought.
Cope called this method quote front porch farming, because once
everything was planted. If you had binoculars or a telescope
to check on things, and electronic controls for your gates,
you could just do it all from your front porch.
Yeah you didn't. You didn't need to raise food crops
to sell. Just plan all your fields this way, kind

(26:20):
of shift the cows from one pasture to the next,
super easy. In his philosophy, Cope hosted agricultural officials and
dignitaries at his farm. In nineteen forty three, he founded
the kud Zoo Club of America and also started a
daily early morning radio program for farmers that he broadcast

(26:42):
from his porch. He also had a daily column in
the Atlantic Constitution from nineteen forty five to nineteen fifty.
Cops kud Zoo Club had twenty thousand members at its
peak and established a goal of planting eight million acres
of kut zoo. In nine nine, he published a book
called Front Porch Farmer, which sold eighty thousand copies and

(27:05):
was also used as a textbook. Sometimes. Cope is described
as the reason why kad zoo became so widespread in
the South, and while his newspaper column and radio program
reached a lot of people and estimated three million acres
of kud zoo had already been planted by Cope was
definitely one of the most visible and memorable people associated

(27:28):
with all of this, though. He was interviewed in Time
and Newsweek, and he was nicknamed the Prophet. When the
Atlanta Constitution printed a kudzoo centennial in ninety six, it
called him a kudzoo Zealot. Gets the photo caption of him.
I think by the time Cope started his radio show,

(27:49):
the U. S d A Was kind of starting to
walk back It's kud Zoo Enthusiasm. Revised version of kut Zoo,
A Forage Crop for the Southeast that was published in
three no longer insisted that kudzoo was not a pest. Instead,
it said, quote kut Zoo is sometimes a nuisance when

(28:10):
growing in places where not wanted. It is not hard
to kill. However, although it takes a lot of work
to remove it from places that cannot be mowed and plowed.
It will not stand continuous close cutting, and can be
killed by mowing four or five times a year or
by close pasturing throughout the growing season. Where these methods

(28:32):
cannot be practiced, cutting by hand must be resorted to
or some chemical weed killer used. And it was becoming
increasingly clear that the aggressive use of kud zoo in
the southeastern US had some drawbacks. Sure, it's a farmer
pastured cows on kudzoo. They would naturally limit its spread
as they grazed, as would regularly cutting kudzoo fields to

(28:55):
bail into hay. But the vast amounts of kudzoo planted
along the road and railroad embankments, that's another story altogether.
There were no grazing livestock or regular mowing going on
to keep it controlled. Plus, when the government stopped paying
farmers to plant kut zoo, they mostly quit doing it. Yeah,
a lot of farmers had other options that they kind

(29:17):
of preferred. But when it came to like the the
road embankments and the railroad embankments and all that, like
kud zoo was still in a lot of places the
plant that grew the best on that kind of steep
slope with indifferent soil left undisturbed. The kud zoo that
was planted along Southeastern highways and railroads quickly grew into

(29:40):
adjoining fields and forests. It grew up utility poles, pulling
them down or causing shorts. It also grew across the
railroad tracks that it was sup post to border, and
then as trains ran over it, it broke down into
a slippery goo that could do everything from slowing down
the trains progress to even causing derailments. And that huge

(30:02):
root system I mean the roots can be massive, and
those seeds that take forever to germinate also meant that
kad zoo could crop up again in places where people
thought it had been removed, and then especially in more
remote areas, that meant it could establish another foothold before
anybody really noticed. In nineteen fifty three, the U. S

(30:22):
d A stopped advocating kadzoo's use for groundcover and for fodder.
The kad Zoo Club of America disbanded sometime in the
nineteen fifties as well. In nineteen sixty two, the Soil
Conservation Service recommended the planting of kad zoo only in
areas that were far away from homes orchards, forests, and fences,

(30:42):
basically anything that could be overrun if the plant was
not carefully managed. That same year, Channing Cope died. He
had continued to grow kud zoo on his property and
to advocate for it even after the government had really
stopped its support, and as his property had become increasingly overgrown,
he had also refused to allow officials and to try

(31:04):
to control it. So he had this secluded property with
kudzoo covered arbors and alcoves, and that became a popular
hangout for teenagers and a story that was attributed to
his friend Philip Cohen. His death followed a heart attack
while he was going out to yell at some teens
to get off of his property. That's such a heartbreaking,

(31:25):
Lee Mimi death like the um. In two the U.
S Government declared kad zoo a weed, and in it
was added to the Federal Noxious Weed Act. By this point,
multiple states and municipalities had laws on the book prohibiting
the planting of kad zoo or levying fines for allowing

(31:46):
it to spread beyond a person's own property. Although the
federal noxious weed list is no longer including kad zoo,
it is still classified as a noxious weed in several
states in the US. Today, kudzoo is primarily associated with
the Southeast and especially the Deep South. But it grows
in thirty two states, stretching all the way north to

(32:08):
Maine and west to Texas, with a few patches also
found in Washington and Oregon. Katzoo has also been discovered
in southern Ontario, Canada. It doesn't proliferate as much in
places that are colder or drier than the southeastern US,
although it can still sustain itself and spread. And then,
of course, there are also concerns about how global warming

(32:31):
might expand this plant's favored range. Seemingly every source on
kudzoo reports that it covers somewhere between seven million and
nine million acres of land in the US today and
that it spreads at a rate of a hundred and
fifty thousand acres a year. And if you've ever driven
a highway or ridden on a train and seem huge

(32:51):
swaths of kad zoo growing along the banks and uphillsides
and covering trees and telephone poles, that probably sounds about right.
Looking out the window, it can feel like you're seeing
the edge of an impenetrable, endless expanse of kudzoo. But
as we said earlier, kutzoo loves full sun. It can't
penetrate deep into the trees because it's just too shady

(33:12):
along the forest floor. Yeah, it really likes the edges.
And if you're in the car looking out the window,
like the edge is what you're seeing. Uh, that's seven
to nine million acre number also seems to be just
hugely inflated. According to an article in Smithsonian Magazine by
Bill Finch, lead horticulture and science advisor to the Mobile

(33:35):
Botanical Gardens in Alabama, this figure seems to have come
from a small garden club publication and not from a
rigorous study. The U S Forest Services most recent Kudzoo
survey took place in and at that point, Kudzoo covered
only an estimated two hundred twenty seven thousand acres of

(33:55):
forest in the US, spreading by about two thousand, five
hundred acres a year. There is no official agency measuring
how much kudzoo is growing outside of forests, but research
ecologist Jim Miller has estimated that Kudzoo covers about five
hundred thousand acres of urban and suburban land. That's a lot,

(34:16):
but it is so much less than nine million acres.
It is also a lot less than many other invasive
plant species in the US, including Japanese honeysuckle, Chinese private
English ivy, air potatoes, and tallow trees. In general, kudzoo
is demonized in a way that these other more widespread
and often more destructive plants simply or not. There's even

(34:39):
a possibility that the amount of kad zoo in the
United States is starting to decline, although some people argue
that we should learn to live with and use kudzoo
rather than trying to eradicate it. Officials and property owners
all over the country have been working to get rid
of it for decades, using everything from aggressive cutting to
controlled burns, to urbside its, grazing animals, and one of

(35:03):
my favorite stories from my research for this in two
thousand and six, goats were being used to try to
control kudzoo near Chattanooga. They kept being attacked by dogs,
so they brought in donkeys to guard the goats, and
that didn't work, so the next year they switched to
guard lamas. I mean, if you've ever seen an angry lama,

(35:25):
this makes all the sense on earth absolutely. Earlier we
talked about how insects feed on kut zoo in Asia,
and one of these, the Japanese kudzoo bug, was first
spotted near Atlanta in two thousand nine, probably having arrived
on board an international flight. This bug has since spread
to multiple adjacent states, and it seems to have reduced

(35:47):
the spread of kud zoo in these areas, in some
cases quite dramatically. The Japanese kudzoo bug also feeds on
another invasive plant with Syria, but since it feeds on
soybean crops as well, its introduction is not entirely welcomed.
Although katzoo's physical presence in the southeastern United States is
a lot smaller than is widely reported, its cultural presence

(36:12):
is just huge. During its heyday and popularity, there were
things like kudzoo festivals and katzoo pageants and kudzoo queens,
and those mostly faded away as enthusiasm for the plant
fell off, but some of them have been revived in
more recent years. Kadzu has also become a recurring theme
in Southern literature, something that mostly started after the plant

(36:34):
became more vilified than praised. James Dickey published a poem
called Kudzoo in The New Yorker in nineteen sixty three.
The poem is full of foreboding imagery, including green, mindless,
unkillable ghosts. It's quoted very frequently in books and articles
about Kudzoo, regardless of whether they're popular academic, although most

(36:55):
sources do not quote its first words, Japan Invades. The
syndicated comic strip Kudzoo depicted rural Southerners, and that ran
from one until shortly after its creator, Doug Marlette's death
in two thousand seven. I Number one found just a
surprisingly large number of poems in my search results of

(37:19):
of databases containing academic papers that that I consult for
the show, way more poems than I think have been
found in any other research process that was not specifically
about a poet. Number two, Man, I got so sick
of that James Dicky poem. Maybe you would talk more
about that in the behind the scenes. Especially as Kudzoo's

(37:42):
reputation declined after the nineteen fifties, it became kind of
a shorthand for southern ness. Often the idea of Kudzoo
conscious up associations with poverty and neglect and decline thanks
to photos of it overrunning things like abandoned barnes and tractors,
but at the same time it's still somewhat celebrated with roads, businesses, festivals,

(38:04):
music groups, restaurants, breweries and beers all named after it,
and I am sure many other things too. Back when
I was living in Atlanta, close to where I lived
was was kud Zoo Antique Small It's one of my
favorite places to go poke around. Anyway, that's kad Zoo,
brought to you by my personal curiosity, prompted by a

(38:28):
random headline during the week. Do you also have listener mail? Sure? Do.
This is from William and it is uh. It follows
our episode on on the Haymarket Riot, and William says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, I've been a listener to stuff you
miss in history class for over ten years, and I
absolutely love this show. Your Unearthed episodes helped inspire me

(38:51):
to go back to grad school and get my master's
degree in archaeology. Maybe one day soon I'll uncover something
worth featuring on the show. As a resident of Chicago,
I will say that it is always great to hear
episodes about the history of our city. The memory of
the incident was recently brought back to the four in
an unusual way. In eighteen, a new folk musical called

(39:13):
Haymarket premiered in Chicago and I was able to catch
a performance. It was a fairly small production, with the
cast doubling as musicians, but was extremely heartfelt and informative.
When you mentioned the eight hours of work, eight hours
of rest, eight hours for what we will slogan in
the episode, I caught myself humming a phrase from the
musical for the rest of the day. The soundtrack is

(39:35):
available on iTunes and Spotify, and I thought you and
the listeners may enjoy it, especially in connection with the
latest episode can't Wait for more Stuff you miss in
History Class, William Well. First off, William, congrats on getting
your masters in archaeology. I feel honored that our show
had anything to do with your your inspiration to do that. Um.
I think I stumbled across a couple of references to

(39:58):
the Haymarket mu csicle during my research, and it was
one of those things that just didn't make it into
the episode, but I am glad to check out some
songs from it when I have a moment to do so.
So thank you William for reminding me of that. Giving
us a chance to talk about it on the show.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at i

(40:20):
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(40:43):
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