the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 42
served for a time in Japan, where he came to believe in nutrient-rich kud-
zu’s potential as a forage crop for grazing animals. He brought samples of
it home to Washington, D.C., and planted the seedlings in his yard. As
chronicled in his autobiography The World Was My Garden: Travels of a
Plant Explorer, things got quickly out of control. The kudzu became “an
awful, tangled nuisance” by quickly covering everything in his yard that
didn’t move. Writing in 1902, he cautioned strongly against use of the
plant which had so enchanted him. Unfortunately, that warning wasn’t
published until 1938.
By then, Charles and Lillie Pleas had been feeding kudzu to their
livestock for de cades. It was as rich as alfalfa in protein and starch and far
better suited to the South’s climate. They touted the stuff through the
1940s “with the intensity and fervor of true believers,” according to author
Lembke, and eventually began their Florida nursery to develop the
vine from seeds, cuttings, and root crowns. Their kudzu mail-order business
was boffo, and they converted their share of doubters. Researcher
Kurt E. Kinbacher, writing in the spring 2000 issue of the Vulcan Historical
Review, notes that agricultural experts at the Alabama Polytechnic
Institute (later renamed Auburn University) were by 1917 exploring the
feasibility of planting kudzu as a cash crop.
The vine also began to generate support from unlikely quarters,
including a central Georgia railroad whose executives imagined great
profits in shipping bales of kudzu hay to market—overlooking that kudzu
is notoriously hard to harvest, bale, and cure—and began providing free
seedlings to farmers as a promotional gimmick. In 1927, an Atlanta newspaper
columnist named Channing Cope picked up the chant, proclaiming:
“Cotton isn’t king here anymore. Kudzu is king.”
The underlying reason for their enthusiasm was the dire condition
of southern soil. During the boom years of the early 1900s, southern farmers
had been working hard to supply the growing nation with cotton, corn,
and other crops. But their traditional—some say reckless—method of
planting the same crops year after year had depleted the region’s soil of