People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1896 — The Tumble Weed. [ARTICLE]

The Tumble Weed.

Tumble weeds spread themselves iu a wholesale fashion. Instead of sending the separate seeds out into the world with wings or hairs to carry them, the whole plant breaks off near the root, when these are ripe, and goes rolling along the ground before the wind. The bare, sun scorched deserts of the great west produce several tumble weeds, and there are some in the prairie region. It is natural that they should be most abundant where there are no hills nor trees to stop them in their course. But we have one tumble weed in the east—the old witoh grass, so called maybe because it rides the wind like an old beldame. In September this grass spreads its head, or panicle, with hairlike, purple branches, in every saqdy field. When the .seeds are ripe,'the plants are blown across the field, oftdh piling up in masses along fences and hedgerows. As might be expected, the hair grass, which has so effective a way of spreading itself, is found throughout the United States< from ocean to ocean.—Thomas H. Kearney, ,Tr„ in St. Nicholas.