When young, bright green, and succulent, tumbleweed, a relative of spinach, attracts browsers and grazers. Desert cottontails and small rodents nibble on its high-calorie shoots, as do pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, domestic sheep, and cattle. But this fast-growing annual quickly becomes inedible, forming a globular mass of tough and prickly stems, as it grows up to six feet high, and fifteen feet across. Tumbleweed's minute flowers, containing no nectar to attract bees, wasps, hummingbirds , or other nectar-sipping pollinators, depend on the wind, releasing clouds of tiny pollen grains to float on the river of air. Because of its windborne pollen and its abundance, tumbleweed is a major irritant to hay fever sufferers in the Southwest.
Wind assists tumbleweed again when the seeds are ready to disseminate.
Tumbleweed's large, dry, ball-shaped skeleton sways with the tug of the wind, until eventually the single stem snaps, freeing the plant to bound across the arid soil. Like them or not, tumbleweeds are a part of the modern West, a reminder of our heedless tinkering with the balance of arid environments. As spring winds propel tumbleweeds into the air to leap across the landscape and scatter their progeny, I dream of the day when their seeds will have a hard time sprouting in healthy deserts and grasslands.