Who, in the South, doesn’t know kudzu? And usually curses it.

It has several names: The Vine that Ate the South, Mile a Minute Vine, and Foot-a-Night Vine. Whatever you call it, we commonly see it along the roadsides, covering bushes, trees, and telephone poles. Where did it come from?

It was a show-off at an 1876 exhibition in Philadelphia where Japan was extolling its native plants. Some horticulturalists were taken with the plant’s beautiful green foliage and fragrant purple flowers and bought it for their gardens and landscaping. However, one planting by a backyard gardener didn’t make for an invasion.

It took someone more powerful to spread this invasive plant. It took the United States government. During the days of the dust bowl, kudzu was pushed as the great answer of soil erosion. Plant kudzu on barren fields and hold the dirt on the ground. Pay farmers to plant kudzu and the woes of years of bad planting practices will be eradicated.

So, Uncle Sam pushed kudzu on the agricultural community. There were also claims that the plant could be a cash crop, but from what I have read, no one could quite figure out how the kudzu was going to do that. Bio fuel, forage, medicinal? To be fair to the invasive plant, it does make good forage and places where animals have been able to graze on it sees much less of the plant. So the idea that if you stand still, it will cover and smother you, just aren’t founded. (“Don’t forget to close your window at night!!”) Kudzu has been used in the treatment of alcoholism. And there are people who make a living on kudzu.

Take the lady who makes over 200 kudzu-vine baskets a year. The vines are tough, yet limber, and basket weavers swear it’s some of the best stuff around for making homemade vessels. There are many herbalists that make kudzu tea, kudzu flour, use the young leaves in salads, and make jelly.

I was curious one year when I heard about the jelly. I used to make a lot of different kinds of jelly. What part of the plant did you use? Were there kudzu berries? No, I looked it up and found that you harvested the blossoms. I had never seen kudzu blossoms. They hide in the same place that old-timers used to claim that nests of snakes lived in. Because I had more curiosity than sense, I took my clippers, buckets and a step ladder one August, down to the American Cinema in Athens (it’s a church last I saw) and drove behind the building where kudzu had grown up the side of the hill. There I found the blossoms hanging in lovely purple clusters. I cut and filled my buckets without seeing ‘nary’ a snake, possum, or any other critter other than mosquitoes. They were worse than snakes.

I took the blossoms home, rinsed them off, and boiled them as the instructions told me. I strained the liquid and used it to make a beautiful purplish-pink jelly. It tasted pretty good, too. Not much different than most milder-flavored jellies since more than half of what’s in the jar is sugar, but it was subtle, not like tea, it smelled more like lavender. And it was very good on biscuits. However, do not count on keeping it for gifts more than the first Christmas. The color changes to a kind of purplish-gray with time. Not at all appetizing looking. I only did it a couple of years. It was much easier to go down to Charleston or Spring City and buy strawberries in May, or to grow my own raspberries.

Kudzu is still intrusive, but according to some scientists, not as bad as the columnists said it was fifty years ago. Still, there is something desolate about seeing a hillside of tall, dead tree trunks covered by kudzu. On the other hand, perhaps kudzu’s greatest benefit is seeing mounds of green rather than rusted hulks of old cars by the side of the road.

Susan Kite is the author of several young adult books and recently sold a children’s book to an Oklahoma publisher.