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as much as anything in modern America. When I searched for it on the
New York Times
website, kudzu
as metaphor had swamped stories about the vine itself. Some of those metaphors I admit to still finding
baffling, though I begin to conclude that if I can unravel them I may have reached the heart of the Amer-
ican psyche. A composer was creating “the kudzu of Jewish music”; someone's bookshelf had “shaggy
dog plotlines sprouting everywhere, like kudzu”; Grace Hightower De Niro spoke with a “southern
drawl peeking beneath her syllables like a branch under kudzu”; a front-row fashion event attendee was
accused of hooking her foot around her ankle “kudzu-like.”
7
And there was a story about an insect, the bean plataspid, or stink bug. It likes to eat kudzu leaves,
and is popularly known as the kudzu beetle. It arrived, like its namesake, from Japan, and is spreading
out from Georgia like—you guessed it—kudzu.
8
Kudzu was far from alone among alien plants in winning US government approval in the early twentieth
century. The Department of Agriculture for a long time had an Office of Seed and Plant Introduction,
dedicated to bringing in foreigners rather than keeping them out. In 1943, David Fairchild, its longtime
head and the country's plant explorer in chief, boasted that his staff had achieved almost two hundred
thousand introductions.
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And kudzu is by no means the only alien introduction to go from wonder plant
to botanical pariah.
The story of tamarisk (
Tamarix ramossisima
), also known as salt cedar, is most interesting. If kudzu
somehow sums up the Deep South, then the story of tamarisk says a lot about the West. Like mesquite
in Africa, the thorny bush has gone from being a bulwark against advancing deserts to a prime cause
of their advance—from a finder of hidden water to a water-guzzling monster that is drying up rivers.
For some decades, the people of the US West have been removing tamarisk bushes from riverbanks and
desert margins, almost as a civic duty. It is public enemy number one in the arid West, but there is grow-
ing evidence that it may be a victim of trumped-up charges.
Tamarisk is an old-world staple. It is found widely in the Middle East and turns up from the Atlantic
shores of South West England to Korea, as well as across much of Africa. Its grayish-green leaves first
appeared at the Harvard Botanic Garden in 1818. It was bought and sold in the eastern United States as
an ornamental plant before government scientists and US Army engineers decided it was a good way
to prevent soil erosion out west. Department of Agriculture researcher Mark Carleton, a cheerleader for
tamarisk, boasted in
Science
magazine in 1914 that “there appears to be no limit in dryness of the soil
. . . beyond which this plant will not survive.”
10
The plant sunk long roots that found water and bound
the soil. It didn't mind drought, fire, or salt. Its wood was valued, and it had influential friends. In about
1920, the famed ecologist Aldo Leopold installed tamarisk in front of his house, which backed onto the
Rio Grande in Albuquerque.
Tamarisk was widely planted but also spread on its own. It loved river bottoms and kept intruding
on iconic American landscapes: around the alkaline springs of Death Valley, for instance, and in the
Grand Canyon. It replaced much-loved cottonwood (
Populus deltoides
) and willow (
Salix
) and began
to be blamed for drying up rivers and emptying underground water reserves. The origins of its abrupt
recasting lie in the perennially murky world of water politics in the arid West, says Matthew Chew of
Arizona State University.
11
The story—a botanical version of the great water movie
Chinatown
—goes like this. In the 1930s,
mining companies in Arizona and New Mexico were desperate for water. But the rights to water from
the local rivers were mostly already allocated to farmers. Somehow, they had to find “new” water. Or,
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