Over time, I have changed my mind about which invasive, non-native weed I despise the most.

Maybe I’ve just gotten so used to kudzu that it doesn’t seem as out of place as it once did.

Kudzu is still a lowdown sucker that does a lot of economic harm in timber and it is an expensive chore for maintenance of roads and utility lines.

The import Johnsongrass is still a headache.

Originally brought here for livestock forage, Johnsongrass can’t live in pastures because cattle eat it to death. But it thrives outside pastures in ditches, turnrows, industrial sites and backyards that aren’t mowed on a close schedule.

The foreigners cogon grass and tropical soda apple haven’t been annoying us nearly as long as kudzu and Johnsongrass, but they are two more species we’d rather had stayed put in their native lands.

However, Chinese privet is the alien plant that disgusts me the most.

Although officially on the Mississippi Ten Worst Invasive Plants list, privet does not cause as much economic damage as some of the others.  But in my opinion, the reason to hate privet is more about aesthetics than revenue.

Privet takes over fences, spouting from seeds deposited by birds perched on the top wire. With a few years’ growth, privet blocks out the view of whatever is behind the fence; rolling pasture, baby calves, old barn, lone pear tree, abandoned hay rake, etc.

For years, the best part of my drive south to visit my mom was the cattle farm views around Gloster to Centreville and on south outside the Louisiana towns of Norwood and Wilson.

But now privet hides most everything most of the way.

Ditto for the former dairy farm scenery of my roots over in St. Helena Parish a tad southwest of McComb.

And even here in Central Mississippi, privet owns a lot of roadsides out in front of nice hardwood forests and deer camps.

Privet was intentionally brought to the United States in 1852 as a landscape shrub. It caught on well for that purpose, especially in the rural South.

It was, and is, a tough plant and easy to grow. And plants were free as sprouts from neighbors’ yards.

Taxonomically, privet is Ligustrum sinense, a member of the olive family and very closely related to the shrub that goes by their genus name, Ligustrum.

As with several Asiatic evergreen broadleaf shrubs, a variegated version of L. sinense was developed to give the shopping homeowner more choice.

Like the original, the colorful variegated one produces thousands of seeds that birds love to swallow and pass on in the wild where they are apt to come up solid green and be officially noxious and aesthetically obnoxious.

To be fair and truthful, there are imported landscape privet species other than the one called “Chinese” and those others have not escaped and become invasive.

I read about one bona fide landscapist who calls privets “privys” because, he says, that’s the only site worthy of them; next to a privy!

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Terry Rector is spokesman for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District.