Scenes from the Old South - Scene 21

Kudzu Covered Hills

he name kudzu describes one or more species in the genus Pueraria that are closely related, and some of them are considered to be varieties rather than full species. The morphological differences between them are subtle; they can breed with each other, and introduced kudzu populations in the United States apparently have ancestry from more than one of the specie. Kudzu was introduced to the United States as an ornamental bush and an effortless and efficient shade producer at the Philadelphia Continental Exposition in 1876. In the 1930s and '40s, the vine was rebranded as a way for farmers to stop soil erosion. Southern farmers were given about eight dollars an acre to sow topsoil with the invasive vine. The cultivation covered over one million acres of kudzu.