The Vine that Ate the South - The Terror & Revival of Kudzu

The most unbelievable part of The Walking Dead was that Atlanta wasn’t completely covered in Kudzu after the collapse of the government.

The south: oh you’ve saved us! Kudzu: more like under new management

In 1934 my grandfather gave an oral report for his Chattanooga area high school about how kudzu was going to grow all over everything, killing the natural vegetation. Everyone laughed at him. When i was in that same high school in the 90s, the local government had bought and released goats all over Lookout & Signal mountains to eat back as much kudzu as possible.

I am from Mississippi and kudzu represents the creeping sadness of the passage of time for me. When I was growing up, it covered forgotten shacks, old cars, shut down businesses, and other neglected things that time passed over. Signs that life was once here, maybe vibrance and fun but not any longer. Just you and the vines in this middle of nowhere town. Now that I am in my 30's, every time I return home, kudzu has claimed another one of my old hang outs. Growing over it and rendering it inaccessible or inoperable, much like the memories are to me now. They are there but they will never be the same. Kudzu is a horribly depressing thing for me.

As someone who lives in the south, i can confirm that it is EVERYWHERE it's basically the textbook definition of "invasive species"

Everyone is surprised that he's making a video on just a random plant, but you all should have known that he'd find a way to portray it as an eldritch monster.

I remember seeing a show or mini documentary about kudzu many years ago where one interviewee called it “a vegetable form of cancer.”

"The night the Kudzu takes your fields, you sleep like the dead." - S King

Im so glad he’s came out, he’s hinted at it for years with his floral shirts. Congrats on becoming a botanist!!!

"The cold won't kill it. It will just slow it down." Lol. Definitely a horror movie line

The mention around the 20minute mark of just introducing the beetle nearly gave me a heart attack, because if you don't know a very similar chain of events have lead to the ecological disaster of Cane toads on the eastern side of Australia.

I once dated a man from Alabama. He said he was walking through the woods when suddenly he fell through the kudzu and ended up flat on his back in a gully. The vines had grown completely over it so he couldn't see what he was stepping into! Luckily, he was able to get out, but you can easily imagine someone falling and hurting themselves and not being found, or a stray cow or horse falling into a ditch.

getting suspiciously close to mold iceberg

“People get their hands on a fast growing non native plant that seems to solve all their problems, only for it to grow rapidly out of hand due to excessive planting and a lack of understanding” sounds like the plot of a sci-fi horror movie, yet here we are!

as a little kid i had this recurring nightmare about a vine that grew fast enough to cover people. i didn't see or learn about kudzu until much later, but i can understand the horror stories that emerged. there's something indescribably unsettling about climbing plants

Larry Burkett's book on "Giving and Tithing" drew me closer to God and helped my spirituality. 2020 was a year I literally lived it. I cashed in my life savings and gave it all away. My total giving amounted to 40,000 dollars. Everyone thought I was delusional. Today, 1 receive 85,000 dollars every two months. I have a property in Calabasas, CA, and travel a lot. God has promoted me more than once and opened doors for me to live beyond my dreams. God kept to his promises to and for me

this was the last thing i expected him to make a video on lmao

As an Appalachian living in the mountains, you'd almost be convinced you were living in a rainforest by how prevalent this stuff is.

I'm always reminded of the story my grandfather on my sister's side would tell about how his father lost 2 cows and some sheep to Kudzu. They'd wander into the patch for food, get so tangled up you couldn't even cut them out without injury, and just die from exposure.

I moved from California to rural South Carolina when I was a kid and the kudzu just being everywhere was one of the most jarring things about the South for me