tumbleweed

It was very, very windy today.  I always think of winds being especially strong in March, here, but it's the middle of April.  The first large ball of tumbleweed has lodged itself in the lilac.  Then I took the car out to the store around 4 p.m. - and by the time that I went out for a walk at 6, it had three of the round spiky weeds lodged beneath it.

I'd been thinking that I'd put some tumbleweeds in one of my book chapters, as a kind of Western counterpart to dandelions - getting everywhere.  But although there's some exciting contemporary art that uses the concept of tumbleweed to talk about boundaries, and migration, and for that matter litter, it's spectacularly absent from nineteenth century paintings of the West.  Sagebrush galore, but no tumbleweed that I've yet found.  And that, of course, is not at all surprising, because it's a vegetative latecomer, an invader - "invader," that is, because the whole vocabulary of "invasive plants" is so loaded.  Its first aggressive, tenacious seeds seem to have arrived in South Dakota in a shipment of contaminated Russian flaxseed - and since each large tumbleweed ball can have up to 200,000 seeds to scatter (ouch!), all the ones that don't get eaten by prairie dogs and mice and seed eating birds grow into new tumbleweeds ...

... so if it spreads that quickly (and indeed, although it's chilly outside, its new tender shoots are just sprouting in the front flower beds) why didn't it make its way into nineteenth century paintings?  Time to visit some more Western art galleries ... I could be very wrong.