I have a beautiful friend that  I have telephoned from the side of the road for many summers now and said “Kudzu flowers!” and given the location. I love kudzu flowers. They are the most beautiful shade of purplish blue, tiny in a vast sea of green. They are hard to see and so give the impression of rarity, yet for the plant to live and thrive, if it is a flowering plant, then they probably are quite common, we just don’t notice them.

    I don’t love kudzu. I dare you to find someone in the South who does. If you do they probably have a fever and you should get them a cool drink and ask them to sit down. Kudzu was brought to the United States in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia PA as part of a beautiful Japanese garden exhibit. During the 1930s the CCC began planting  the vine for erosion control. In the ‘40s the U.S. Government actually paid farmers to plant it.  Little did they know the impact kudzu would have.

    Kudzu is a perennial vine that can grow to 98 feet in length with roots that can reach three to nine feet in depth. That’s why you can’t just pull it up and throw it on the curb for the city to collect and expect it not to return shortly. It flowers July through October and kudzu actually produces fruit, believe it or not, in flat hairy two inch long pods September through October. I personally have yet to see a kudzu fruit pod, but plan to hunt them this fall now that I know they exist. I’m thinking I’ll go back to the place I picked their flowers a few weeks ago and start looking there. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

    The South is the perfect place for kudzu to thrive. Our climate is warm and moist (euphemisms for hot and humid) and the kudzu had been relegated to places where it was cool and windy and rocky, a native of Asia, and boy did it love us. I see kudzu as a metaphor for trouble!  Lots of things cause trouble and are manageable in small doses. Storms, for example, that are short in duration and not geographically widespread can be very beautiful. The problem, the trouble, comes in when these things are in unmanageable doses or when they hang around for longer periods of time or when they are widespread.    

    When obstacles or aggravations or stumbling blocks grow large they become trouble. They either find an environment where they are allowed to grow large or they just grow large beyond our ability to control them. And like the beautiful flower of the kudzu, that’s when we must slow down and look carefully for the beauty, because often there is beauty, if only in the character required to outlive troubles.

    I don’t like kudzu, but I admire it. I want to be resilient like kudzu. I want to dig in and put down deep roots and drink in the nutrients around me. I want to find a way to thrive in the environment in which I find myself. I want to grow up toward the sun and reach high. I am inspired by people around me who do just that, who sometimes even just grit their teeth and refuse to quit when it’s so hard all they want to do is just curl up and cover up. Those are the people the kudzu flowers are for.