Newt Hardie
Photo by Carroll Foster
Newt Hardie
Age: 80
Hometown: Spartanburg
Occupation: Retired in 2001 as vice president of financial planning from Milliken & Co.; now president of the Trees Coalition
Little-known fact: Hardie has nibbled on the Vine That Ate the South. The cooked leaves, he recalls, were “like a potato chip.” But the taste didn’t soften his attitude toward the plant. “The flowers are gorgeous,” he says. “And that’s the only nice thing I’ll say about it.”
Learn more: For more information on the fight against kudzu, visit treescoalition.org or Facebook.
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Drive around Spartanburg with Newt Hardie, and you will be given new eyes.
Where once you saw a pleasant-enough Southern scene—a shady ravine here, a front-porch neighborhood there—you now see an insidious threat. The menace is kudzu. It’s everywhere, and Hardie’s mission is to eliminate it, one patch of ground at a time.
It all began about 15 years ago as he picked up trash on Spartanburg’s South Pine Street. The corridor into town is lined with flowering cherry trees, and Hardie noticed that two were being eaten by kudzu.
The S.C. native and former Navy officer decided to take action. Saving those two cherry trees led Hardie to begin a group now called the Trees Coalition, whose volunteers aim to rid trees of kudzu and other invaders.
Hardie and his team kill kudzu with a chemical-free method they discovered by trial and error. He demonstrates the technique one sunny morning, donning his orange safety vest and meeting up with a couple of volunteers almost as enthusiastic as he.
Kneeling, Hardie sweeps aside some vines to reveal one of the plant’s crowns, then severs it with a saw. The roots won’t regrow, and that means the world now has one less kudzu plant. Still, an acre of kudzu can have 100,000 or more crowns. And vines can shoot 60 feet in a growing season. Hardie knows all this. But don’t expect it to get him down.
“Discouraged? Absolutely not!” he says. “Because we have 117 sites around town where we’ve made progress. You can do something about kudzu. It’s not unstoppable. It’s not something you have to give in to.”