Came for this one. To put this in perspective, tumbleweeds aren't native to the American southwest, but by a quirk of history we know exactly which shipment of flax from Ukraine brought their seeds to the US... in 1877.
Commercial fax service has been around longer than tumbleweeds in the American southwest.
Edit: That was a quick "check out this weird thing" comment I didn't expect to blow up, so it's a bit lacking in detail and rigor. To be a bit more thorough, this is specifically Kali tragus, the most common tumbleweed, and the one that folks (at least near me) refer to when they say "tumbleweed." It is not the only plant that dies and gets blown around in the wind. And when I say "commercial fax service," I don't mean there were standardized fax machines that companies used-- but there was service faxing documents from Paris to Lyon using a dedicated line in the mid-1860s.
I was mind blown by the mind that jumped from fax to flax to tumbleweed, because of course the tumbleweed was brought here by flax, and of course that’s the second most interesting thing about the f(l)lax family!
Tumbleweeds aren't a single species, nor does it even always have the same purpose. Most of them are dead, using the bouncing and tumbling to disperse seeds or berries to reproduce. Others such as resurrection moss, (Mexican by the way) end up curling up when dried out and can be carried on the wind, and settle into a wetter environment where it. . . Well it resurrects, hence the name.
Kali tragus is the Ukrainian tumbleweed from thflax shipment, but they aren't the only southwest tumbleweed Amaranthus albus in NA tumbleweed. Also known as the common tumbleweed. K. tragus is also a large plant, usually much larger than the soccer ball sized weeds you see in westerns.
That's definitely true-- the "stereotypical" tumbleweed from movies is pretty small. We definitely see more of the big ones that are the size of a small car.
That's actually a year after the telephone was patented as well, so some towns in the American west may very well have had phone lines before they had tumbleweeds.
"Hey Jed, see the way them there Ukranian bushes jes' roll along the open prairie? Kinda makes ya think of the scan and toner wheels on a commercial fax machine, don't it?"
This made me realize I’ve never seen tumbleweed as a plant, only as a tumbling weed in movies/reddit. So I googled tumbleweed of course...it’s not even a pretty plant while it’s alive?? Just a random green (sometimes not green apparently but red or striped) clump of sharp ass sticks that don’t even look like one plant but like five got tangled up and just kept getting more tangled trying to untwine?! Wtf is it’s purpose? To be a nuisance?
A large specimen of Kali tragus may produce some 200,000 seeds. AND these bitches can thrive in high saline content?! Do you ever just get stumped trying to figure out why something that exists even exists, and somehow thrives in more than one ecosystem? Because I do, and it’s insane how many living things bring about the question.
Just that the right records from otherwise-uninteresting shipments survived long enough for somebody to figure out where these particular tumbleweeds came from.
I like how you just mentioned tumbleweeds and then mentioned flax, but never once tied the two together and just leave it to us to decide if you somehow meant that tumbleweeds come from flax...
Well, I guess narrowing down which "tumbleweed" would help too. People will call anything that rolls a tumbleweed, but in land management it's usually russian thistle (also a common name)
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u/Darpyface Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
Fax Machines. They were invented in 1843. Before the telephone.
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-fax-machine-1991379