There’s a popular horror novel titled The Ruins. The book—pulpy in concept and execution—concerns a troupe of tourists who detour from a Cancun beach holiday to venture deep into the Yucatan. Out in the jungle, immersed in an alien environment and cut off from modern convenience, the hapless gringos are tormented by rapacious sentient vines. Driven by instinct or perhaps supernatural malevolence, the plants slowly wear down their prey, entangling them in ropey tendrils before dissolving their flesh with acidic sap. One by one, each character is consumed, leaving behind nothing but a white bones wrapped in lush green foliage.

Come summertime, the American south is also blanketed in lush green foliage. The transformation can be dramatic: treelines, utility poles, railroad ditches, and seemingly every fallow field and overlooked lot are suddenly obscured by a dense leafy layer. Much of this vegetation is kudzu, a sinewy deciduous vine native to the warmer latitudes of east Asia. Also known as arrowroot, the plant made its American debut at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it was displayed at the Japanese pavilion alongside block prints, samurai armour, and other novelties from the far away country just recently opened to international trade.

In the Victorian era, tales of carnivorous flora became a cultural preoccupation. In major metropoles, newspapers are filled with lurid reports of man-eating plants, stories gathered secondhand by credulous naturalists visiting the farflung jungles of Madagascar or Sumatra. Later, fiction, too, becomes rife with deadly vegetation. Authors like H. G. Wells, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft all publish yarns featuring vampiric orchids and other botanical monsters. The trope is rooted in contemporary anxieties: Europe’s colonial encounter with unfamiliar tropical biomes, Darwinian concern about primacy of man, and a general unease with a potential upending of the natural order.

Kudzu is a formidable organism. Under the right conditions, it’s incredibly fecund and under the wrong ones, it remains incredibly resilient. The plant can thrive where others cannot, even in depleted, nutrient-poor soil. A single sprout will branch into dozens of distinct vines, each stretching up to 100 feet in length. During peak season, these tendrils grow more than a foot a day, quickly smothering the surrounding landscape and crowding out any competing vegetation. Below ground, its root systems run deep and branch out rhizomatically. After thorough culling fresh growths will continue springing forth, hydra-like, from its hidden stolonic nodes. 

In the moors of Herefordshire, in the town of Kilpeck, a small church has been standing for nearly a millenium. Pilgrims stepping inside are welcomed by a stone visage staring wide-eyed from the doorway; pouring from its grotesquely agape mouth are twin coils of thick, leafy vines. Across Britain, variations of this foliate head, or green man, appear again and again in medieval architecture. His origin and meaning are murky. One theory points to the apocryphal fate of Adam—upon death, the first experienced by man, vines sprang from his mouth and engulfed his body, a sign of life’s continuous cycle.

In the 1930s, the American south faced the twin challenges of agricultural depletion and economic depression. For a moment, many saw a better future in kudzu’s sinuous mass. The government promoted the fast-growing plant as a means to combat soil erosion, a possible cash crop, and an infinite source of livestock feed. Farmers, offered free seeds and bonuses for sowing them, gave over millions of acres to kudzu cultivation. In the end, kudzu took more. Untamable, the vine crept from its fields and claimed huge swaths of land. Within two decades, the plant wasn’t the solution, it was a problem.    

The cliche is that kudzu is the vine that ate the south, though the south has made a feast of kudzu, too. Southern authors and artists reaching for easy local color opt for green—drape enough verdure around your scene and everyone knows you’re below the Mason-Dixon. The plant is ripe for metaphor as well. The unruly and unkillable vegetation standing in for both the region’s tenacious spirit and its intractable sins. As Alice Walker wrote, “racism is like that local creeping kudzu, if you don’t keep pulling up the roots it will grow back faster than you can destroy it.”

Whatever war is waged against the arrowroot will not be won. The ecological disruption of climate change only creates a more favorable battlefield for a plant that thrives in heat and humidity. Like grasping runners winding up a tree, the vine’s territory continues to climb upward into higher and higher latitudes. As the temperature rises, so does the kudzu belt—from the deep south through Appalachia into the Allegheny plateau and beyond. As the species displaces native flora, it destabilizes carbon stored in the soil, releasing more than it takes in. Acre by acre, it makes the planet its own greenhouse. 

An tree entirely enveloped by climbing vines, hunched under the additional weight of its predatory companion, is an uncanny thing. Together, kudzu and host take on novel shapes, and sometimes, become something else entirely: a shrouded golem, a hulking beast, or towering archaeology. Whole forests cloaked in arrowroot are remade into eerie topographies, canyonlike, a cascading, rippling, and irregular surface. Whole buildings, swaddled in leaves, lose their regular right-angle geometry, emerging as something organic, fringed, and indefinite. Imagine the gradual incursion captured in time-lapse; watching the expanding growth probing, surrounding, and eventually subsuming its target, an amoeba, viridescent and unstoppable. 

When it all falls apart, kudzu will inherit the Earth. Just as previous generations fixated on monstrous plants eating men, ours loves a post-apocalyptic vision of vegetation overtaking and outlasting us, an end fit for our environmental anxieties. It can be a gentle eschatology, one where we are gone, lost to hubris or some cataclysm—a thermonuclear war, uncontainable virus, or errant asteroid—but the remnants of our civilization endure as vine-covered ruins. Our skyscrapers, our freeways, our monuments, our homes; all crumble and decay, laden with foliage and overgrowth, hanging gardens, wonders of a new world order for whomever comes next.