Kudzu is a climbing vine that originated in Japan and southeast China before invading the southeastern region of the U.S. Kudzu was originally introduced to North America for its aromatic blossoms and sturdy vines. Those same vines now have the region by the throat. Left unchecked, they will keep creeping across the nation to the Midwest, Northeast, all the way to the Pacific. But to me, seeing kudzu as I drive or walk anywhere in this new town in Tennessee reminds me I’m home.
In western North Carolina where I was born, kudzu grows over native trees and bushes and buildings and telephone poles and settles like giant, leafy green blankets. Best seen along highways, there are fields and fields of it. In summer, the green cuts into a blue sky and it seems like these are the only two colors that have ever and will ever exist. The same is true of the stretches of land beside 75 South and 27 North in Chattanooga.
My dad once told me a story from when he was growing up. He was driving through Mississippi with his aunt and uncle and watching the kudzu pass when his uncle told him that if you looked really, really closely, you could see the kudzu growing. He told me this and despite knowing it was a folk story meant to tease gullible children, I still peered out my car windows trying to catch the vine in the act.
In high school, we had to do a project where we found and identified 50+ leaves from different trees in our region. We learned about native plants and the invasive ones forcing them out. It is because of that project that I can point at kudzu and name the river birches, red oaks, and trees of heaven (also invasive) that the vine is slowly subduing.
Although I’ve only been back living in the Southeast for a month and a half, there is so much comfort in the familiarity—of iced tea that is sweet, of the chirping of bugs that filled my childhood evenings, of magnolia trees that are the right kind of magnolia trees, of kudzu-covered exit signs. Even despite knowing kudzu is invasive to the Southeast, it has become almost native in my mind, serving as a large symbol that this is where my roots were planted.
I wish I could tie the metaphor of a creeping vine to my creeping return to the Southeast, my invasion of this town where I’m still learning where to get on the highway. I suppose in some ways I am like kudzu, trying to subdue familiar experiences, trying to perform in the way I would’ve in a similar climate, even though I am in an entirely new place.
But the truth is, I don’t want to have any similarities with kudzu beyond maybe being aromatic and sturdy. Kudzu is strong, but the fight for our native plants is not yet over. It is easy to feel defeated when the green leaves seems to cover everything, but I have to believe that strategies like controlled mowing or grazing can and will be effective in combating what many call “the vine that ate the South.” And maybe then the symbols of my home will be ones that are truly native.
Carlisle Patete (‘22) came to Calvin University from the mountains of North Carolina and graduated with a double major in film & media and creative writing. After brief stints in Los Angeles and Chicago, she now resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she enjoys sweet tea on her front porch and identifying every tree and bird she runs into on any hiking trail.
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Beautifully written, love the imagery of the Kudzu growing over traffic signs and covering fields— made me think of the old Jumanji movie when the jungle takes over. Very magical and mysterious!!