Humble Tumbleweed Has Hidden Talents

Gnomelike and rotund, the tumbleweeds dot the prairie or huddle along fences, growing pricklier as they grow older. When it’s time to die and regenerate, they send brief prayers to their patron saint, and seasonal wind whooshes in.

And then the tumbleweeds tear free. They roll and rollick and leap, taking tall hedges in a single bound.

“I’ve seen ‘em blow across the Los Angeles River,” said park supervisor George Stigile with fond admiration. Those with no connection to agriculture--where the tumbleweed is known as a noxious weed--often sound that note.

Where there is fondness, it probably dates to childhood. Stigile, in charge of West Valley maintenance for the Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Department, told of the tumbleweed snowmen when he was young.

“There were a lot in the Sun Valley area, the Lake View Terrace area. They’d gather ‘em, paint ‘em white.”

Warms to Subject

Warming to his subject, his tone rose. “Roscoe Boulevard? There used to be a whole street, each house with a tumbleweed snowman,” he said, especially across from J. H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley. “I’ll never forget it!” He said he hadn’t seen such any “snowmen” lately.

But the notion rolls and bounds through the years until it finally sends up a sprout in somebody’s mind.

Last July, said Linda Moussa in Northridge, “It came to me.” She remembered the snowmen of her youth--she grew up in the San Fernando Valley area--and several months later enlisted a friend’s company.

“We drove all the way to Agoura,” she said. “I was picky.” They returned with six tumbleweeds strapped to the top of the station wagon.

“I really had a ball doing it!” Moussa said. Her children, Melissa, 6, and Jason, 4, contributed encouragement and curiosity in a shrewd, hands-off approach until the three parts of the snowman’s body were assembled. Linda wore heavy gloves.

“Oh, he was just treacherous” until the white spray paint was applied, she said, explaining that “the paint moderates the thistles; that toned him down.”

Given Top Hat

She painted an ice cream container black to make her snowman’s top hat. The cardboard core of a roll of paper towels became its long red nose. Lids of tin cans formed the eyes; paper plates, the buttons; charcoal briquettes, the grinning mouth; and part of a red plastic table cloth, the scarf. A neighbor’s tree branches became arms and Moussa added a network of lights as the final touch.

When the snowman was finished, Jason tenderly threw his arms around it, his mother said. “I think it will remain in my kids’ memories forever,” she said, then paused. “I hope I don’t have a virtual forest of tumbleweeds in the spring!”

There is little chance. A tumbleweed bent on progeny would give one glance at the Moussa’s manicured front lawn on Nordhoff Street and roll on by. Tumbleweeds--or Russian thistle, the species most prevalent in the Valley--prefer open areas that have been disturbed and then left fallow, noted Mary Corcoran, professor of biology at California State University, Northridge.

“You find it in vacant lots, below power lines, where there’s been a road cut,” she said, “or with a change in the environment enough so that foreign plants come in.” That disturbance can even include land being grazed by cattle, she said.

Not Meant for Cattle

Anyone concerned with a cow’s diet disparages them. Not that a cow would eat tumbleweeds, but “They’re tougher than most plants,” said Jim Bachman, professor of animal science at Los Angeles Pierce College in Woodland Hills. “They crowd out other plants that could be forage,” he said, in a manner so dry, flat, sage and prosaic that it suggested a man of the land provided by Central Casting.

The pushiness of the weed is common to many plants that are not native, Corcoran pointed out. The tumbleweed’s major roll some years ago was, accidentally, over the seas from Asia, she said, in a shipment of other goods.

“They’re amusing as long as you don’t have to deal with them,” she said.

“Undesirable,” Bachman pronounced.

The only positive aspect of tumbleweeds that CSUN biology professor Kenneth Wilson could provide was that, at least in the Valley, “There’s a lot fewer of them now then there were 10 or 15 years ago.”

Well, um, are they a good habitat for birds or anything?

The professors pointed out the foolishness of creating such an unstable home, where at any moment a bird or rodent would have its attic in the basement and vice versa. “I wouldn’t if I was one,” Bachman said in a level tone.

And yet, for all its unpopularity in certain circles, some of the legends associated with tumbleweeds can also be mown down.

Not Menace on Road

No, they are not a menace on the road. A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol said, “Blowing plants are not logged” in the computer system of statistics. This fact, he said, demonstrates that the tumbleweed is either a non-existent or negligible factor in vehicular accidents, because “we tend to home in on things that are fairly common” in assigning statistical categories.

No, Valley golfers don’t find them troublesome, although parks maintenance supervisor Stigile remembers when they used to blow across the Woodley Golf Course in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, in much greater numbers than they do these days.

The assistant golf pro at Woodley says that if you hit your ball into a tumbleweed, moving or stationary, it is merely considered the rub of the green: you just have to retrieve the ball.

“There are stories of children being chased by them,” Corcoran observed. But that is a rumor that proves hard to pin down. And if there are many families like the Moussas--bounding over the prairie with the image of a snowman in their mind’s eye--the tumbleweed is not the party doing the chasing.