[Publib] Re: Kudzu (was Friday humor)

[Joe Schallan]

On May 2, 2007, George Hazelton wrote:

"Kudzu, the bane of the South.  It was imported to
this country by the USDA in an effort to control
soil erosion and in the hopes that it would furnish
food for cattle."

George and list:

Here's a good page on kudzu, which includes
photos showing it engulfing a house and a forest:

http://www.invasive.org/eastern/biocontrol/25Kudzu.html

George also commented:

"I am firmly convinced that should we expire in an
atomic Armageddon, the only life forms to survive will
be cockroaches and kudzu."

And mesquite, the bane of certain parts of the Southwest.

I planted two saplings in my yard . . . nice, slowly growing
desert trees with low water requirements that will
eventually provide shade, I thought.

Slowly growing my ***!  In five years they went from
saplings to trunks a foot in diameter, killed everything
else in the yard, and scraped the paint of my wall.  In
their search for water, they shot roots into my neighbor's
yard sixty feet away and started killing her grass. A
dust devil came through my yard and split one of them
from the crown down to the base of the trunk and it
scarcely fazed the thing at all.  These trees from hell are
unbelievably tough.  Cutting and burning does not
kill them.  My only remaining question about them is why
the entire surface of the western US is not now covered
with mesquite trees.

A colleague cheerfully announced one morning that she
and her hubby had put in desert landscaping, including
a mesquite.

"You'll be sorry" I said.

(They also drop piles of leaf litter and huge pods, though
in their defense I must point out that our native species
-- not used in landscaping in favor of exotic mesquites
from South America -- was long a food source for native
Americans. The pods could be dried and ground into
a nutritious meal.)

Back to kudzu.

Last summer Dusty Gres decided to go to conference and
thought she could leave her car parked for a few days
by the dumpster in back of her library.  Here was the
predictable result:

http://tinyurl.com/2by8qc

Happy weekend, y'all, and to you southerners, be sure
to move the car around a bit between now and Monday
morning.

--Joe Schallan
Phoenix