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Comment by jdhendrickson | Hacker News Reader

Driving through dead forests covered in this vine on my way to PA from TX, I would respectfully disagree with their premise. When allowed to proliferate it strangled everything visible from the highway, and covered every inch of the hundreds of standing dead wood trees it had killed.

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> everything visible from the highway,

But isn't this exactly what the article is arguing?

> As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade.

> Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles.

It's kind of ignoring the fact that as development proceeds, the ratio of "greenery within 100 yards of a road" to "forest" grows rapidly.

> And that, perhaps, is the real danger of kudzu. Our obsession with the vine hides the South. It veils more serious threats to the countryside, like suburban sprawl, or more destructive invasive plants such as the dense and aggressive cogon grass and the shrubby privet. More important, it obscures the beauty of the South’s original landscape, reducing its rich diversity to a simplistic metaphor.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person that's read a given article... Though I guess I actually read it last time it was posted.

Following the comments on some other posts recently, I’ve concluded that a small proportion of people read past the headline before commenting.

Kudzu is an edge plant; it thrives in the boundaries between ecological zones. Where open land turns into forest you see it. Right there in the tangled thicket mass of bushes, shrubs, small trees and other vining plants. Deeper into the forest the canopy blocks more light and it opens up as the opportunistic, edge plants get shaded out.

Did it kill the trees, or did it proliferate after the trees died (and increased the direct sunlight reaching the ground)?

Kudzu does grow up and over live trees and kills them. It will also grow over abandoned buildings, or nearly anything really.

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