![]() ![]() A few indigenous tribes discovered it even had medicinal uses, and could be adapted to treat things like the flu and smallpox. Other people on the frontier let them dry out, and burned the dried plants for use in soapmaking. Americans being the types that we are, though… well, farmers found a way to use this brand new weird poky plant and fed the young sprouts to their cattle when they ran low on feed – and other animals, like mule deer and prairie dogs, will eat them too. ![]() Back in the 1880s or so, some very odd plants started turning up in the Dakotas – evidently, a couple of tumbleweed seeds had stowed away in a flax shipment from Russia (they’re technically called Russian thistle), gotten loose, and rapidly became an invasive species. Nope, they got here completely by accident. Since I’ve literally never even held a tumbleweed before (plot twist, they look like they should be soft and squishy but are in fact sharp and poky), I started thinking about tumbleweeds, their history, and what the heck sort of magical mayhem can I make with them.įirst of all, turns out that even though we here in the US associate tumbleweeds with the wide open west, cowboys, and other such forms of Americana, they’re not actually native to this continent at all. So of course my next thought was, AHA MAGIC CAN BE MADE. Not only that, people are selling their TuMbLEwEeD aRt on Etsy for a LOT of money, so if you’ve ever had a fantasy about turning your living room into the set of Yellowstone with a $4,000 tumbleweed chandelier, oh boy, are you in luck!īut that’s not really my vibe – my 1920 cozy cottage’s decor style is somewhere between “found it at the thrift store” and “what an oddly comforting combination of colors and fabrics,” so tumbleweeds dangling from my ceiling isn’t really the direction I’d like to go. Naturally, the first thing I did was google “what can I do with tumbleweeds?” which led me to the conclusion that suburban American moms on Pinterest are NOT OKAY because y’all are making some weird-ass tacky shit with your tumbleweeds. Regardless, now I’ve got these two big-ass tumbleweeds sitting on my front porch because honestly, it seems like a shame to just ignore them but also WHAT THE HELL CAN I DO WITH THEM? Now, keep in mind that I don’t live anywhere near Montana at all, so it was a neat surprise and quite a novelty to get them, and it stemmed from a long-running joke in my family’s group text. When we think of a desolate plain or a foreboding frontier town in the wild west, we might think of the iconic tumbleweed rolling through the scene.So, I recently found myself in possession of a pair of large tumbleweeds, plucked from a roadside in the middle of Montana. But for people who live in dry parts of western North America, the tumbleweed is, in fact, a weed that can block doors or clog waterways as they gather in piles. They’re neighborhood nuisances that create fire hazards. They also cause accidents when they roll out onto roadways.Īs it turns out, tumbleweeds are not native to the United States. They’re invasive Russian thistles that flower, die, dry up into a spiny skeletal ball, and roll. ![]() Tumbleweeds start out as any plant, attached to the soil. Seedlings, which look like blades of grass with a bright pink stem, sprout at the end of the winter.īy summer, Russian thistle plants take on their round shape and grow white, yellow or pink flowers between thorny leaves. Inside each flower, a fruit with a single seed develops. Starting in late fall, they dry out and die, their seeds nestled between prickly dried leaves. ![]() The day after Christmas this year we took our usual family road trip to grandma's through the dairy deserts. Gusts of wind easily break dead tumbleweeds from their roots. Apparently we normally avoided the wind because as we drove through a dust cloud as thick as London fog the road filled with high speed tumbleweeds, and amongst this two in particular were coming right at us-the size of the ones in that gif. A microscopic layer of cells at the base of the plant - called the abscission layer - makes a clean break possible and the plants roll away, spreading their seeds. Then explore the tumbleweed’s classic image in American pop culture with this tumbleweed supercut by Duncan Robson, a short video commissioned by the Columbus Museum of Art: Learn more from the Deep Look video above: Why do tumbleweeds tumble? When the rains come, an embryo coiled up inside each seed sprouts. ![]()
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