Devoured

Kudzu has become a visual symbol of the southern United States, an establishing-shot mainstay like barbed wire for Texas or the Statue of Liberty for New York. The curtains of green leaves draped luxuriously hover everything still mean “the South”—not bad for a vine native to east Asia that made its biggest advances during the Great Depression. Pretty but vilified (like this review’s author), the fast-spreading verdure is the poster child for invasive plant life. In her new book Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine that Ate the South, environmental reporter Ayurella Horn-Muller pokes through the underbrush to bring readers a fuller picture, both scientific and cultural, of this symbolic but understudied plant.

Devoured is a pleasantly sprawly book. Instead of starting with the first fateful imports of the vine and charging forward, Horn-Muller moves from topic to topic and interview to adventure, valuing story over chronology. Her interlocutors include artists, scientists, horror writers, bemused observers, and other people into whose lives kudzu has twined a tendril.

[Read Chris Turner-Neal's review of Glory Be here]

It turns out kudzu is more interesting than it looks. Technically edible, though reports of its palatability vary from culture to culture and gourmand to gourmand, the curious and the thrifty have jellied its blossoms, stewed its leaves, even approached its starchy root for potato-style uses. Occasionally used in traditional medicine, kudzu has attracted attention from researchers who think it may be able to treat problem drinking. (Horn-Muller’s description of the experiment, with refrigerators full of subjects’ preferred beer, a “good table” ruined, and an ingeniously weighted coaster, is gold.) Artists have woven the plant’s tendrils into sculptures; authors have taken the sobriquet “vine that ate the South” to its gory extreme. Most intriguing is kudzu’s apparently near-supernatural ability to refresh soil, transforming thin, depleted earth into dark, fertile dirt: perfect for planting crops, if you can manage to reach them under the kudzu. This is the trait, of course, that most directly led to kudzu’s planting across North America.

The curtains of green leaves draped luxuriously hover everything still mean “the South”—not bad for a vine native to east Asia that made its biggest advances during the Great Depression. Pretty but vilified (like this review’s author), the fast-spreading verdure is the poster child for invasive plant life.

Horn-Muller’s style takes some getting used to: she is the most idiosyncratic footnoter I’ve ever read, using notes to define the common term “fermentation” and comment that “the Peach State” nickname for Georgia is a relic of white supremacy without explaining how, and then calling Georgia “the Peach State” uncritically a few pages later.

Any quibbles about writing, however, are easily swept away by the author’s clear interest in and affection for her topic and fellow fanatics of the prodigious creeper. Her journalistic background serves her especially well, as she puts herself into the story just enough to build trust and investment without making the book Ayurella’s Kudzu Adventure, which would have been easy to do (and which I might well have done). Instead, her subjects have the chance to emerge as their own characters, all of them charming on the topic the way true enthusiasts often are.

Horn-Muller, a mixed-race daughter of immigrants, feels a kinship with kudzu: like the vine, she has Asian roots and has encountered different attitudes about her presence here. This idea of invasiveness, of who or what gets to stay here, runs through her work. If not every point she makes on the topic wholly convinced me, she and her interviewees successfully bring the broader symbolism to the reader’s question: why is kudzu invasive but other plants naturalized? Are Asian carp and Asian hornets made dangerously exotic by these names?

Kudzu is here, and it’s not going anywhere: Horn-Muller convincingly argues that there is value in responsibly managing it, using it as we can, and simply living alongside it. It’s inspired the people in her book—maybe you’re next. 

lsupress.org.