I like tumbleweeds. There, I said it, though I freely admit that my feelings on the subject are based on aesthetic and romantic notions only. Along with the scent of rain and the howl of coyotes, tumbleweeds are, to me, emblematic of the West, particularly the desert. I’m not born and bred here; I’ve only been here for thirty years, so maybe my attitudes can be forgiven.
I know that tumbleweed, or Russian thistle, is an invasive species inadvertently imported to this country from Eurasia in the 1870s and causing trouble ever since. It put in its first appearance in South Dakota, quickly infesting plowed fields and hampering crop cultivation. Its spiny, inedible mature form caused injury to livestock and impeded machinery. Its seeds contaminated grain shipments and waterways, and eventually spread the plant to every state in the country excepting Florida and Alaska.
This wayward ball of seed-dispersing twigs is another of nature’s clever methods of taking care of business. Each plant produces several hundred thousand seeds. The immature form is soft and limber, even consumable by animals. When it matures it becomes dry, brittle and thorny, like so many of us. Finally, when the plant dies, a good gust of wind can easily snap the bushy above-ground skeleton from its roots, whereupon the zombie plant begins to roam the earth, on a mission to create more of its kind.
These ambulatory shrubs, free at last, roll and bounce and, well, tumble, carefree, wherever the wind takes them. They get stuck on fences. They land in rivers and float to some exotic destination. They clog culverts and drainages. They get wedged under cars.
Ranging from one to five feet in height at maturity (the largest on record was 38 feet in diameter) depending on growing conditions, tumbleweeds are lightweight and highly flammable. They can wind up anywhere. In 2019 the Washington State Department of Transportation had to use snowplows to clear SR 240 out of Richland of 25-foot-high drifts of tumbleweeds, where many vehicles, including a tractor-trailer rig, had become immobilized and buried. (Similar incidents have occurred in California, South Dakota and New Mexico, sometimes trapping people in their homes.) So yeah, I get it. Kali tragus, aka windwitch aka Russian thistle, is a nuisance. It serves not much useful purpose and little good can be said of it.
Tumbleweeds aren’t really thistles, of course, though they (or some of them) are indeed from Russia. There is more than one variety, some of which are toxic. Several types are found in North America, both native and invasive. Due to ongoing drought conditions in this country, tumbleweeds are growing more densely and larger in size than ever before. The US Agricultural Research Service has been looking for a way to combat this mobile flora, and has announced a possible herbicidal solution. This involves an infectious fungus endemic to the Russian steppes, where the tumbleweed originated — which makes me nervous. History shows that declaring hostilities (much less biological warfare) against a plant isn’t always the best idea in the world and seldom works out particularly well. It generally costs billions of dollars and ruins untold lives before we reach that conclusion, though. But that’s a different subject. We’re slow learners.
It may surprise you to know that tumbleweed isn’t utterly worthless. I’ve discovered, in my exhaustive research on the subject, that during the Dust Bowl years virtually the only plant that thrived was the humble tumbleweed, and the succulent young plants were heavily used as animal fodder. Kansas alone harvested several hundred tons of “thistle hay” annually for this purpose. Destitute and desperate humans used the plant as food too, even canning it against future need. Animals, industry and people were saved. What a classic and tragic tale: the previously unappreciated saves the day, but is then forgotten, returning to wander the wastes alone. I salute you, tumbleweed.
When hiking along a Utah river bank on a windy day and a tumbleweed the size of a Smart car comes barreling across the water, leaps up on the bank and passes by like it’s late for an appointment in Kanab, I can’t help but smile. And I can’t say why. I think it’s the randomness of it. I like living in a place where I might encounter the unpredictable — a rattlesnake, a Native American ruin, a boondocking hermit, a dust devil, or even a meandering weed.
