![]() ![]() I tried mowing them down with a weed whacker, burning the babies with a propane torch. The tiniest glimmer of Salsola would catch my attention, and I’d have to chop a whole patch dead. Salsola was everywhere.įor the next few months the weeds and I fell into a cycle of prey and predator, and I acquired the instincts of a hunter. I’d canvass every square foot of the property, and one week later I’d have to do it all over again. Throughout the summer we would spend most Saturdays stuffing 40-pound trash bags with the latest crop, trying to interrupt the ancient cycle by preventing the young plants from setting seed. Knowing they would soon double and triple in size, we hacked them with hoes, loaded them into the back of my Jeep, and hauled them to the dump. In another week some of the plants had grown as big as bowling balls. ![]() In a few days they were the size of my hand, their rubbery, purple-veined fingers pulling back troll-like as I tried to yank them from the ground. They looked so pretty and innocent, the young ones, basking in the sun. ![]() With the spring snowmelt and the first summer rains on the ranch, thousands of Russian thistle seeds began to erupt into the sunlight, appearing against the brown earth like tiny blue-green stars. The seeds then lie in wait, preparing for the next wave of the invasion. Good for almost nothing, the biggest plants-they get as large as Volkswagen bugs-can scatter as many as 250,000 seeds along a path extending for miles. Then they go rolling and rolling, merging into masses of ugly, brown thorn clouds that can bury a house or feed the fury of range fires. Every winter the plants die, and the stems become brittle, breaking with a gust of wind. An invader from the Eurasian steppes east of the Ural Mountains, Russian thistle has shown an appalling ability to thrive in its adopted land. Salsola, I would discover, is their Genghis Khan. Photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel share the challenge-and fun-of chasing tumbleweeds. Programmed by evolution to eke out a living in the harshest regions of the planet, they find life anywhere else like retiring to Florida. The names we give these creatures are a testament to humanity’s disgust: pigweed, dogbane, horseweed, sow thistle, stink grass, ragwort, poverty sumpweed. There was also kochia and flixweed, a wild mustard that seemed to resist both fire and herbicides, and yellow toadflax, which exudes a skin-burning chemical (a Homo sapien-icide) to fight off human pickers like me. I had fought weeds of all kinds at our house in town, including the occasional tumbleweed. A few months later, after purchasing the property, we found more: piles of tumbleweeds that had accumulated against a stand of piñon and juniper trees during the March winds. Salsola tragus, as it’s properly called, or Russian thistle, has become ubiquitous in the West. We had noticed a few brittle tumbleweed skeletons lying around. My own encounter with these monsters began one autumn when my wife and I decided to buy some land-a couple of acres for horses on the outskirts of Santa Fe. But this episode, “Cry of Silence,” holds a special horror for me. There were scarier moments in The Outer Limits, the old black-and-white science fiction series. Where did all that energy come from? How can you animate a dead weed?” “It was just like an octopus!” he shouts, after tearing it from his face. When her husband tries to intervene, one of the tumbleweeds leaps at his eyes. “They’re following us,” the heroine cries. Yet one by one, like wolves in the night, tumbleweeds start gathering around them. The trouble begins around sundown, when a couple of city slickers out for a drive in the desert become stranded along a lonely canyon road. This story appears in the December 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. ![]()
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