I think most of us have heard where one road paved with good intentions leads. Among other bad results from the best of intentions are a couple of our worst weeds here in Mississippi, they being Johnsongrass and kudzu.

Johnsongrass gets a capital “J” because its namesake, Col. William Johnson of Alabama, planted it and promoted the Mediterranean native grass to his neighbors as a good livestock pasture grass. The plant actually had been in the South for at least a decade before Johnson planted his. And like all plant common names, anybody can call it anything, and they did. Interestingly, it was an 1880 letter from a farmer in Selma, Ala., to one in Woodville, Miss., that is credited with making Johnsongrass the widely used common name.

It didn’t take long to find out Johnsongrass came with way more disadvantages than advantages. For one, a fall frost or a summer drought can cause young Johnsongrass to produce a form of cyanide toxic to animals. Secondly, Johnsongrass serves as a host of plant diseases that affect corn. But, by far, the realization that we would have been better off without Johnsongrass came when it began taking over cotton fields. And from there it spread to roadsides, ditches, vegetable gardens and cemeteries.

We know Col. Johnson was not personally responsible for bringing in the weedy grass bearing his name. We don’t know who was. But woe would have been unto the long ago dude who did, be he a good-intentioned Southerner or a well-meaning Yankee.

The other foreign plant once promoted to feed the South’s livestock and also save our soil is the Asian import kudzu. Believe it or not, the Kudzu Club of America had a membership of more than 20,000 in the 1940s. There were kudzu festivals complete with kudzu queens. And I once got a phone call from a reporter with the Memphis newspaper asking if I knew where “Boveena,” Mississippi, was because he had been told that was the kudzu capital of the world.

Kudzu got its U.S. introduction as a display plant at large exhibitions, first in Philadelphia, Penn., in 1876 and then in New Orleans in 1883. It caught on as a porch vine grown to provide shade on porches of the rural South. Then all kudzu heck broke loose when federal government agriculturists deemed kudzu a great forage crop for livestock but, more importantly, an erosion-preventer on former hillside cotton fields. Between 1900 and 1950, the government grew and gave away 85 million kudzu seedlings to landowners in the Southeast.

By the later 1950s, kudzu was seen as another invasive, out-of-control weed. It wrapped up utility poles and lines, took over lawns, covered abandoned buildings and sucked up so much water that many native plants died out.

There is one place you rarely will find either Johnsongrass or kudzu, both once thought to have great potential for livestock grazing. And that is in a cattle pasture. Cows do like them both, so much so that neither stands a chance of surviving!

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Terry Rector writes for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District, 601-636-7679, ext. 3.