Windblown desert plant

Usage examples of tumbleweed.

Another accident occurred when Flossie Devine, in a Dancing Trout station wagon late at night on her way back from a Capital City dentist, swerved to avoid a mammoth tumbleweed loping across the highway and wound up in a ditch with her new bridgework in her lap.

A lot of the hectarage, though, either lay fallow or appeared to be overgrown with vines and tumbleweeds.

When you think of ghost towns you think of open spaces, two or three blocks of crumbling false-front buildings, tumbleweeds everywhere, a saloon with one of its batwings canted at a rakish angle, hitchracks and horse troughs and broken signs flapping in the wind.

The big, bad Mec went down like a de-pressurized hovercraft, his hat rolling off his head like tumbleweed.

A well housing in the front dirt yard, a rusty 1949 Oldsmobile with bullet holes across the windshield sinking on its rims nearby, big yellow tumbleweed skeletons scattered among a few sunflowers, then the raggedy cottonwoods along the creekbed across the road and the majestic snowcapped Midnight Mountains beyond.

But half-grown tumbleweeds, speckled yellow-green and ready to start their rooted period, were rolling through the grove towards the disturbed area.

Drifts of tumbleweeds, winter blizzards, dry rot, errant cattle, broke down both fences and communications.

To the west he could see a green band that was the edge of the south farms, but to the south was nothing but the spread of tumbled, empty buildings, a scene lost somewhere between city scape and landscape, animated by rolling tumbleweeds and, once in a while, the ragged figure of a scavenger too weak to venture very far from the city walls.

Something was burning, with a smell that reminded him of burning tumbleweeds when he had worked a summer in the Kansas oil fields.

Kansas also contains manufacturing and tumbleweeds, which are plants that form themselves into giant balls that roll across the prairie and burst into your motel room at night, which is why the American Automobile Association recommends that you always sleep with a weed whacker.

I could make out a number of features: clusters of tumbleweeds, like giant beach balls, creosote bushes, bayonet cactuses, yuccas, and the leggy branches of the palo verde trees.

The huddled shadows tended to form and reform, shifting, as the wind pushed the tumbleweeds across the uneven ground.

A short spell later, four of her vaqueros herded what she called her eight best ponies around a corner through the wild mustard and green tumbleweed.

No lack of I tumbleweeds there, every one is the leader of the herd, and only the evil have blowouts.

Someone had shot it in the head and buried it under tumbleweed to make it look like a big old clump of brush against a bobwire fence.