Tumbleweed

March 07, 2024

Brandy McCombs AP

Inside the front section of my local newspaper, I found an AP article on how areas around Salt Lake City, Utah, were being inundated by windblown debris.   This debris rolled in over the weekend and blanketed some homes and streets in South Jordan, a suburban Salt Lake City.  Crews were brought on Tuesday to plow, load, and haul the dried carcasses four days after scores of the beachball-sized plants were bounced in by heavy winds.  Dawn Ramsey, South Jordan’s mayor said, “People woke up Saturday morning and it looked like these huge walls had been erected made of tumbleweed,” said. “We had entire streets in some of our neighborhoods completely blocked. They wrapped around homes.”  Saturday’s tumbleweed takeover is not isolated, nor is it a conspiracy by the invasive Russian thistle to conquer the western US.  These occurrences are due to combinations of seasonal wet and dry weather, the death cycle of the tumbleweed plants, and the strong gusts that propel them.  Mayor Ramsey said that three consecutive windy storms in 2021 brought in tumbleweeds to South Jordan, but not like Saturday’s event.  Cleanup was nearly complete by Tuesday afternoon as 13 dumpster loads of tumbleweed had been taken to a landfill.  No damage has been reported.

When I looked online, I found tumbleweed (Salsola tragus), also known as prickly Russian thistle, windwitch, or common saltwort, is a species of flowering plant in the family Amaranthaceae.  In regions of the US, it is the most common and conspicuous species that produces tumbleweed (other species do as well).  The young version of the species may be grazed but then become too spiny and woody to be edible to most wildlife and livestock.  Mature specimens are often more than 39 inches (1 m) in diameter.  As its fruits mature, the seed pod (diaspore) dies, dries, hardens, and detaches from its root.  This detached part of the plant is colloquially called “tumbleweed”.  Once detached, the dry orb will tumble (roll) with the force of the wind.  As the dead structure tumbles, it gradually falls apart, spreading as many as 200,000 seeds across the land.  If the seeds disperse in a wet area they can germinate rapidly.  Tumbleweed has a high tolerance of salinity and can successfully compete with native plants in environments like sea beaches, grassland, desert, or semiarid regions.  Native to Eurasia, Salsola tragus has proven to be highly invasive as an introduced species and rapidly became a common ruderal weed of disturbed habitats throughout the world.  It is believed tumbleweed was introduced into the US by Russian immigrants as a contaminant in flax seed.

Utah is not the only environment to be overcome by tumbleweed.  Mini-storms of tumbleweed swamped the drought-stricken prairie of southern Colorado in 2014, blocking rural roads and irrigation canals, and briefly barricading homes and an elementary school.  Parts of Victorville, California, were nearly buried by the large balls of the dried weeds in 2018.  Tumbleweed is known to damage non-native plants and environments and its highly flammable nature sometimes helps wildfires spread, especially during windy conditions.  An ignited tumbleweed may spread fire across firebreaks and even ignite buildings or structures that it stops against.  Erica Fleishman, of Oregon State University and director of the Oregon Climate Research Institute, noted that little work has been done on how climate change may affect tumbleweed.

THOUGHTS:  Tumbleweeds have become entrenched in western US culture and how many view the Old West.  They also figure prominently in “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” a song recorded by Sons of the Pioneers in the 1930’s and identify the singer with the drifting tumbleweed rolling through the empty western spaces.  This is yet another immigrant which now defines an iconic age of Americana.  Act for all.  Change is coming and it starts with you.