Love in The Time of The Kudzu Vine
It moves quickly, stretching across the countryside and engulfing trees, fences and homes. It reaches up hydro poles and across transmission wires, eventually collapsing them under its weight.
-Globe and Mail, September 26th
I imagine the kudzu as a giant green snake, stretched across our nation with houses digesting in its belly. I imagine us slowly migrating up north, towards Nunavut and the ocean where it’s too cold for the kudzu to survive, or learning to live with the kudzu, on top of it perhaps, destitute except for plenty of tea.
At times, the invasive plant’s arrival in Canada sounds more like an environmental science fiction film than an agricultural reality. Experts use words like “endemic” and “catastrophic” to describe the finding of a small patch of it by Lake Erie and in the US, the kudzu costs the agricultural industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year to control. It sounds like if we left it alone, the whole country would get covered up with kudzu and part of me wishes to see that, a truly historic occurrence.
The Baron in The Trees by Italo Calvino is about an Italian boy named Cosimo who climbs up into the trees to protest his parents’ treatment of him (they were making him eat his dinner) and never comes down again his whole life. He grows old up there and finishes his education up there and takes part in revolutions up there in the trees, because he manages to travel long distances without touching a toe to the ground. He even falls in love up there and remains in love with the same girl for the rest of his life, because he can’t follow her when she gallops away on a horse.
The kudzu catastrophe reminds me of The Baron in The Trees, not only because it’s growing a bizarre and far reaching infastructure of plants, but because it’s somehow lovely and somehow devastating. At times, the kudzu vine’s arrival in Canada sounds more like a romantic work of literature than an agricultural reality.
