Commentary: Our sweet and bittersweet relationship with vines

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about plant vines.By Amy Miller

Today I will be offering sci-fi. I won’t be making up dystopian fantasies, but rather will elaborate on the terror that strikes when it comes to invasive, insidious vines.

It started with the pandemic. Two weeks of isolation seemed the stuff of not-quite-believable movies. Two years of saying home and avoiding indoor human contact was more like fodder for fantastical youth fiction, something like the book I read about the boy who was locked in his room for his entire childhood.

But here it was happening. In my life. For real. A virus had taken over The Whole World.

So when I walked through my woods and saw the invasives growing, expanding, even choking trees to death, I wondered if in fact man-eating plants might kill humanity.

My dog walks were no longer peaceful communes with nature. They had turned into hunts – for everything from Japanese barberry, Japanese knotweed, and the "mile-a-minute weed" the most horrifying of all, for the Asiatic bittersweet.

A vine that begins slender, cute and curly, bittersweet grows to devour anything in its hungry, winding path. With the pandemic changing what I believed could be real, I wondered, almost seriously, if that anything some day could be you or me.

Through hands-on research in the form of frantic pulling, I knew this bittersweet has easily recognizable orange roots. Pulling it out was satisfying at first. But soon I saw that the little curly stems were everywhere, and big ones had already killed trees in my backyard. Did I mention that the vines can be six inches in diameter?

So of course I Googled. The Net mainly confirmed that small plants and seedlings can be pulled by the roots when soil is moist, and larger vines can be cut. But, as Maine.gov warned, “aggressive re-sprouting will occur.” And if you are going to cut, cut it before the berries get spread by birds.

Maine's experts also note that cutting alone – “multiple times during the growing season over several years - may kill the plant.” If you are lucky is implied. Furthermore, they emphasized the need for “diligence” over at least three years.

Vermont was no more reassuring. “Use extreme caution when hand pulling. Even tiny fragments of the root can re-sprout, quickly multiplying the problem.”

Pesticides are the next level of attack. My neighbor preferred to hire someone to get rid of his vines, but his are mine and mine are his and a professional can only hold back the bitter wave by a few years.

A professional landscaper friend spoke truth to me. We humans can do little to make this vine go away, he said. The forest is changing where invasives exist. The best we can do is protect our own plots to save our peas and peonies.

So, I concluded, you best stay out of the forest if you don’t want to be tormented by vines. And for heaven's sake, don’t put the bittersweet berries in your holiday wreath.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

Growing up, my playground was the woods, a world of wonder to explore. I learned uses for the materials I found, including vines of many varieties.

Blackberry vines yielded delicious handfuls of treats, and when I restrained myself long enough I provided enough for my mother’s wonderful cobbler. Fall muscadine vines yielded delightful after-school treats. One location, involving a strenuous climb, rewarded us with an overabundance of the juicy orbs bursting with flavor.

However, my most useful vine was the lowly honeysuckle. The flower, when separated ever so delicately from the vine, shares a drop of flavor. Then I used its vine for binding sticks together, making a tool, or binding branches together, making a waterproof overnight hut or clubhouse. It was a useful natural material, and always available.

I used the colorful rambling rose vine to make gifts of love for my mother.

Of course I also learned of not-so-useful vines such as kudzu, which farmers once were paid by the government to plant, but in our rich Black Belt soil enveloped the landscape. It is used to make noodles, but it grows about a foot daily, literally covering everything. Before trash pick-up began, most Village of Greenwood residents used backyard ditches and others burned their trash. Kudzu would swallow our ditch, so to resume its use - with blood, sweat and tears - I had to cut its vines back.

And yes, there was poison ivy, but it was not a problem for us because we studied it, as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, along with poison oak and poison sumac.

My aunt, a nurse, loved to garden and cook. Her backyard trellis of grapes became wine, forbidden to us children. But she and my father each grew vines of sweet potatoes, and my father’s mentor, Dr. George W. Carver, made over 100 products from the yam. My aunt made candied yams and the tastiest sweet potato pies. One Christmas she made a dessert pudding with sweet potatoes and regular potatoes. And yes, I had seconds!

I have been privileged to work with many incredible people. One in particular was Victor A. Khan, a prolific research scientist from British Guyana. He taught children the history of Carver and Booker T. Washington, and how to double sweet potato crop yield on a single garden row. He also taught them to make and market sweet potato ice cream.

Yes, the wrong vines can be worrisome, the same as good vines growing in the wrong place. On the other hand, vines can be quite useful. In 1999, Tuskegee University became the first Black institution to perform a NASA space experiment, and sweet potatoes actually grew in space, without soil or gravity. The sweet potato variety used was created by Victor A. Khan.

Guy and Amy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Commentary: Our sweet and bittersweet relationship with vines