The gnarled icon of the Old West — ominously featured in movies as gunslingers square off on dusty streets and townsfolk shake behind curtained windows — rolled in over the weekend and kept rolling until blanketing some homes and streets in suburban Salt Lake City.
Crews on Tuesday continued to plow, load and haul carcasses of twisted and dried tumbleweeds from neighborhoods in South Jordan, Utah, four days after scores of the beachball-sized plants were bounced in by heavy winds.
“People woke up Saturday morning and it looked like these huge walls had been erected made of tumbleweed,” said Dawn Ramsey, South Jordan’s mayor. “We had entire streets in some of our neighborhoods completely blocked. They wrapped around homes.”
Alternative headline: Invasive Plant Species Becomes Unmanageable.
No, tumbleweeds are native to that area.
Nope. They come from Russia.
No, tumbleweeds are native to the Asian Steppe and were brought to the Americas by accident.
Depends on the species.
Sisymbrium altissimum - tumble mustard- and the lighter colored stems in the front of that picture is from the Mediterranean area.
Salsola tragus - Russian thistle - and the darker colored thicker stems in the picture is from the Eurasian steppe region.
Well I’ll be a ruskie’s uncle
It’s a loose rule that if something is described as iconically American, it probably came from somewhere else.
So true
Which is pretty American, if you think about it.
Salsola tragus is native to Eurasia and invasive in the US.
https://rivrlab.msi.ucsb.edu/invasive-species/russian-thistle
I learned recently that there were no tumbleweed in the old west. They didn’t arrive to the American West until the 1870s. All the old western movies were made after that.
Relevant CPG Grey
It’s a good start! Keep em coming
