Poison Ivy

I was just outside checking out my yard. It's a gorgeous cool morning; I wish I had a camera here & could show youall my azaleas. I'm not like all obsessed with gardening or anything, but they're beautiful, and they don't last very long. I moved into this house about a year ago & I really had no idea what azaleas were until my 90-something neighbor, Miss Annie Mae, admired them when they bloomed all pink. And then, like that the flowers were gone; they were just big green shrubs again. A couple of days later, though, I noticed that two of them near my kitchen window were now covered with white blossoms, and the others were starting to blossom with white flowers too. I found it kind of strange that there'd be a shrub that flowered two different colors so rapidly. But what do I know? Then later on I was in the house & opened the kitchen window. A heavy, sweet, and somehow familiar scent filled the room.

Honeysuckle.

"Not like all obsessed with gardening" should perhaps be amended to "very nearly clueless about gardening." But I did know enough to understand that honeysuckle, pretty and sweet-smelling as it is, is kind of aggressive and will choke out pretty much anything. It's not as bad as kudzu, but you don't want it all over your gorgeous azaleas. It looks pretty good on old rusted cars, though, much like kudzu. I'm told that the locals often offer transplanted Yankees (like myself) cuttings of honeysuckle, and people often accept it on account of it looks so pretty and sounds so, well, southern.

I spent that entire afternoon learning how to tell the difference between azalea bushes and honeysuckle vines (not that difficult, actually) and hacking the honeysuckles to death. I got a pile of them about as big as a minivan. And then I discovered the bamboo sending up shoots in a razor-straight line across my back yard. They were obviously runners sent out from Miss Annie Mae's very healthy bamboo stand out behind her fence. I went over to take a closer look at the corner where the trees were bent over under the weight of some vines. Aha! More honeysuckle. I started hacking. And there was kudzu, oh my god kudzu is utterly terrifying stuff. Fortunately just then the lawnmowing team arrived, and they were willing to tackle the bamboo and the kudzu. They helped me move the pile of vines I'd accumulated and pointed out the poison ivy.

I was wearing gloves, and I'd never been allergic, but I didn't want to take any chances, so I left it all in the hands of professionals, glad that it wasn't in my yard.

Well, this year it is in my yard. Apparently the honeysuckle was holding it back or something. And it appears to be a particularly healthy crop. All around my house, everywhere I look I find some.

At least it's not kudzu. That stuff scares me. I don't want to miss the opportunity to plug one of my favorite weblogs: Invasive Species Weblog and this beautiful collection of photographs of kudzu in the southeast: Kudzu - The Vine.