By: Kathryn Barto

When I was a young kid, my grandparents moved to the Black Mountains of North Carolina. Although on the edge of the American South, it was still the farthest south any of my family members had ever lived before. Going to visit them for the first time, I marveled at the new environment, so different from New York. Looking out the car window at the nearby trees, I spotted a mass of vines and leaves that covered the forest and stretched as far as the eye can see. As we got closer to my grandparent’s house, the vines grew thicker and thicker, seemingly swallowing the entire forest in a green blanket. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. Highways and road cuts were surrounded by the stuff and it was all you could see when traveling. Later I learned that all of this vegetation came from a single invasive species called kudzu.

For eight years of my childhood, I went to a summer camp nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just 15 minutes from my grandparents house. Being from New York and then Ohio, my family would make the several hour journey to and from North Carolina every year. Every time we would pass kudzu on the drive, I would marvel at the amount of coverage and the sheer growth of the vines coating the roadside. It seemed like it would eat the entire South at the rate it was spreading.

The summer camp I went to was an all girls camp in the middle of the woods. For two weeks, I was cut off from both the internet and the real world. Looking back, the difference in the forests near the highway and the one surrounding the camp cabins was astounding. Where one was a blanketed mess of vines, the other only had small islands of kudzu surrounded by a diverse ecosystem. Even as a kid, I recognized that kudzu was a problem and its spread could be environmentally destructive.

Kudzu’s monstrous growth is mostly due to its ability to reproduce vegetatively. Kudzu plants have specialized stems called stolons, which can creep along the ground and spawn new plants that are identical clones to the original. If you’ve ever grown strawberries, this is similar to how strawberry plants send ‘runners’ or side shoots that eventually grow into new strawberry plants. Kudzu plants also have another type of modified stem called rhizomes. The ginger you buy at the store is also a rhizome. In the wild, rhizomes stay in the ground over winter and can regrow aboveground in the summer. These allow the kudzu plants to survive year after year, even if cut down or physically removed. Finally, Kudzu vines can sprout roots if touching the ground, adding another point of contact to collect water and nutrients. With all these extra ways to spread, it’s no wonder kudzu has been able to grow rampantly in the South, outside of its natural range of eastern and southeastern Asia.

In the weeks before and after camp, I would stay with my grandparents in their large house on top of Black Mountain. Some of my favorite memories are linked with that house and being able to spend time with family. These moments together were also where I eventually earned the nickname “Kudzu”. When I say that I grew quickly as a kid, I don’t say it lightly. I was consistently one of the tallest people in my grade until high school and was always in the 90th percentile or above when compared to other kids my age. Because I went to camp from 3rd to 10th grade, it seemed that every time I visited my grandparents I had grown significantly. Every time, my grandmother would say I grew like kudzu; this transitioned into her calling me “Kudzu Kathryn” or just “Kudzu.”

My grandmother still calls me Kudzu despite my height topping out at 5 ‘8’’; every time she does, I’m brought back to that moment in the car, seeing the towering mat of kudzu zooming by the window and marveling at its ravenous spread.

Kathryn Barto is a 20-year-old, third-year student at the University of Pittsburgh who is double majoring in Geology and Ecology & Evolution.