Friday, June 09, 2006

Coastal residents worry about 'Kudzu'

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's proclamation that it covers "Dixie like the dew" could just as easily be "We cover Dixie like Kudzu."

Anyone who has ever spent any time in the South has no doubt seen this fast-growing foliage take over ditches, old barns, road shoulders, trees, telephone poles and more. Now, folks along North Carolina's coast are worried about what they call "Kudzu of the Coast": vitex rotundifolia.

Sharon Lewis keeps a scrapbook documenting the progress she’s made building up and protecting the dunes in front of her oceanfront property [according to Freedom Press].

A sand fence funnels pedestrians toward the beach and off the dunes and sea oats. Other vegetation have taken root — another measure in the fight against beach erosion.

Now Lewis doesn’t want to see the “Kudzu of the Coast,” creep in and take over what she’s accomplished.

“I’ve worked like crazy to build up the dunes and I don’t want to see this happen,” said Lewis, pointing to a patch of the menacing beach vitex plant growing in the dunes along oceanfront areas of Emerald Isle.

Lewis was among a small group of Bogue Banks residents who attended a presentation this week about the plant. She then followed David Nash to the beach for a look at the exotic shrub.

He didn’t have much good to say about it beyond one obvious but highly deceptive trait.

“It’s attractive; I won’t take that away from it,” said Nash, a dune plant expert with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. But its pretty purple flowers don’t disguise the negative impacts of the invasive plant that has become the focus of a two-state task force.

Nash, who is North Carolina’s coordinator for the Carolinas Beach Vitex Task Force, said the goal is to locate, document and eradicate the plant before it gets out of control.

“If we don’t do something now, then in 50 years or 100 years, or however long it takes, it will be the kudzu of the coast,” he said.


Read more here.

No comments: