The Dad-gummed Sweet Autumn Clematis

If you cherish nothing but a cloyingly sweet scent (not as horrific as night-blooming jasmine or eleagnus), and I mean you don't care about your house, car, slow-moving children...then go ahead and plant this stuff, or let it come to you, because IT WILL. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

I'm at a loss for publishable words on this stuff. It bears down on the azaleas, hydrangea, and crape myrtles, it stifles the white ginger, it gives me nightmares that a tendril will get into the house and I'll wake up with the vines over my face.

In the photo below, SAC (as in ranSACk) is cheerily throttling a crape myrtle.

BEAST.

That it has no thorns and is easy to pull barely saves it from the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno. But the eighth circle has to be crawling with Sweet Autumn Clematis--Carolina kudzu, our very own diabolical strangler fig.

What can I say? We've devised various demises for it, injecting it with salt water, clipping it to its very roots, but the bloody stuff is quick and sneaky...and, if truth be known, in some places, I let it take off. Because, and this is the part that makes me cry: just when I thoroughly despise it, it'll suddenly explode into this profusion of sweetly scented white flowers, and I almost, ALMOST forgive it.

Notice the attitudes of the crape myrtle and Mexican petunias toward the Sweet Autumn Clematis, bottom right (left; sorry, dyslexic). They're like "Yeah no, I'm outta here."

I racked my brain to find these three redeeming qualities: pollinators love it, it's a great scapegoat, and in some nefarious circumstances it can come in handy.

1. Butterflies and bees dance happily in the snowy, shaggy, crippling behemoth.
2. If you're getting skunked and folks with strings of fish are about to pick on you, just say, "Well, my casting arm's not up to speed because I've been pulling SWEET AUTUMN CLEMATIS." Mere mention will make them run.
3. You can plant it along a fence you share with a neighbor you don't like, and this will annoy the crap out of them. We actually like our neighbors just fine, but having SAC is like having Turret's or something...if you got it, you just can't help sharing.