The tumbleweed species I know best — bunching along highway fencing, sprouting against the walls of office buildings, or flourishing in desiccated backyards — is full of surprises. It’s sometimes called Russian thistle, though it’s not a thistle; it’s a relative of quinoa and beets. It starts out bright green and tender, almost succulent, something you could stir-fry in a pan and plop on a plate; but it’s potentially poisonous if you eat too much. It grows spiny and tough, with scarlet stripes and tiny, papery white flowers; but then withers into a pale skeleton of a plant. By the time that weed is tumbling, it’s dead, but it’s also carrying thousands of seeds holding living embryos, ready to take root and grow in just a little bit of rain. Single tumbleweeds seem inconsequential, yet together they can bury houses or block traffic. These days, when I feel paralyzed in front of my laptop by news about ICE raids and attacks on protesters, I see lessons in tumbleweeds.
Tumbleweed seeds came to North Dakota from the Russian Empire in a shipment of flaxseeds in the 1870s. Seeds then accompanied settlers across the West, falling out of railcars to grow along train tracks, traveling in hay to lumber camps, even stowing away in sheep’s wool to Idaho.
California’s agricultural commissioners fretted that tumbleweed would destroy the state’s wheat industry by making fields unfarmable. In 1905, California passed a law requiring state and local agricultural inspectors to destroy any tumbleweeds they found. This led to some confusion, since barely anyone in the state had encountered tumbleweed or knew what it looked like.
In the end, it was railroads and agriculture that invited tumbleweed to California. Indeed, California grew a whole new species of the maligned plant, something scientists realized in 2002, almost a century after that futile report. The new species evolved by combining the full genomes of two different species from distant corners of the world; according to Science Alert, the resulting plants were even bigger and more prolific than their ancestors and had more chromosomes.
Where tumbleweed thrives, history is complicated. Tumbleweed has saved people who despised it. After the Civil War, white settlers inexperienced at farming plowed up native prairie on the Great Plains. During successive drought years, all the nutritious earth blew away on the wind, creating the Dust Bowl. Rain did not follow the plow; tumbleweed did — and that’s how people survived. A weed of marginal spaces, it sprang up in barren dirt, keeping hungry cattle and people alive.
Tumbleweed may become even more common as the West’s climate grows hotter and drier. What’s more, in Washington, Oregon and Montana, tumbleweed in agricultural fields has become resistant to the herbicide glyphosate. Given its inexorability, scientists have tried to find uses for tumbleweed, such as for fattening lambs. Other researchers, learning that growing tumbleweeds absorb uranium, have considered the plant’s potential for soil remediation. This would require somehow collecting the plants before they blew away. Tumbleweed’s shape and wind-driven motion have inspired the creation of a new Mars rover, also called Tumbleweed, being designed to blow about the surface of the Red Planet. But I have more terrestrial concerns.
How can I write about plants, about the hidden worlds of other species, in this frightening moment? Masked federal employees break into homes, haunt hospitals, punch out car windows, imprison children, disappear people, kill. Friends wonder if we should start carrying our American passports. Sometimes, when I struggle to tear my attention away from the news and focus on the natural world, I go outside. I walk, drifting uncertainly, preoccupied by dark concerns.
Turning a street corner, I hear — cowbells? Crowding intersections, neighbors chant. Cars honk, drivers wave. Like tumbleweed, my community is full of surprises.
People tumble into California cities and towns, even in those State of Jefferson-adjacent communities up north, demanding due process, safety for immigrants and their supporters, basic human rights. They take root along roads with signs reading “Resist” and “Fuck ICE” and “No Kings.” They gather on highway overpasses, unfurling banners; they throng the streets, sometimes wearing silly costumes and carrying megaphones. In my river-hemmed city of Sacramento, as across the West, protesters have learned from tumbleweed’s relentlessness, its way of gathering into an unstoppable force, its mischief.
I’m still not sure how to dig in and write when I feel blown over by windstorms of bad news. But I’m learning that if protesters are like tumbleweed, so too is the truth. It grows, blooms, shatters, saves.
The truth flowers in blighted spaces. It says: When you can’t bear anymore to watch the world in the glow of a screen, join me. Gather outside, it says. Let’s do more than survive.
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