Mile-A-Minute Vine in Newtown

Here's some Mile-A-Minute (MAM) Vine, "Kudzu of the North", festering in Newtown, Connecticut, where it appears to be spreading. That's because of the berries. The vine can grow up to 6" a DAY. Bad. Very bad. Extremely bad. Climbing-up-the-trees-and-killing-them bad.


These bags are filled with MAM but there's lots more growing around them (with growth at 6" a day, what do you expect?). They need a small army of volunteers to pull this stuff before it spreads to the rest of the city, but instead they've had only a couple of people pulling it at the most, and they're losing the battle. Seriously?? The vine is spreading from the original location like spot fires in front of a wildfire. Too bad, since a small effort now would prevent HUGE efforts and damage later on. Just wait until homeowners have to start protecting their trees from being killed by the vine. And they'll wonder how it ever was allowed to spread like that.

Here's a video of the spot. Sorry about the quality, I messed up on the camera settings.


The leave are extremely triangular, and some of the leaves, including the final leaves before the berries, are joined to form a sort of cup that's fused around the stem (see the very first picture in this post).

All the stems have annoying barbs, similar to Tear-Thumb plants, which it is mostly likely to be confused with.

Everyone, please keep your eye out for this plant, and report it here. And if you live in Newtown, please contact the town Conservation Official Ann Astarita (see here), and offer to help pull the weed, because they can't do it alone, not at 6" a day, but they can't seem to find any volunteers. Otherwise, before you know it, we'll all be pulling it out of our yards to keep them from looking like THIS.