Tumbleweed Magic

So, I recently found myself in possession of a pair of large tumbleweeds, plucked from a roadside in the middle of Montana. Now, keep in mind that I don’t live anywhere near Montana at all, so it was a neat surprise and quite a novelty to get them, and it stemmed from a long-running joke in my family’s group text. Regardless, now I’ve got these two big-ass tumbleweeds sitting on my front porch because honestly, it seems like a shame to just ignore them but also WHAT THE HELL CAN I DO WITH THEM??

Naturally, the first thing I did was google “what can I do with tumbleweeds?” which led me to the conclusion that suburban American moms on Pinterest are NOT OKAY because y’all are making some weird-ass tacky shit with your tumbleweeds. Not only that, people are selling their TuMbLEwEeD aRt on Etsy for a LOT of money, so if you’ve ever had a fantasy about turning your living room into the set of Yellowstone with a $4,000 tumbleweed chandelier, oh boy, are you in luck!

But that’s not really my vibe – my 1920 cozy cottage’s decor style is somewhere between “found it at the thrift store” and “what an oddly comforting combination of colors and fabrics,” so tumbleweeds dangling from my ceiling isn’t really the direction I’d like to go. So of course my next thought was, AHA MAGIC CAN BE MADE. Since I’ve literally never even held a tumbleweed before (plot twist, they look like they should be soft and squishy but are in fact sharp and poky), I started thinking about tumbleweeds, their history, and what the heck sort of magical mayhem can I make with them.

First of all, turns out that even though we here in the US associate tumbleweeds with the wide open west, cowboys, and other such forms of Americana, they’re not actually native to this continent at all. Nope, they got here completely by accident. Back in the 1880s or so, some very odd plants started turning up in the Dakotas – evidently, a couple of tumbleweed seeds had stowed away in a flax shipment from Russia (they’re technically called Russian thistle), gotten loose, and rapidly became an invasive species. Americans being the types that we are, though… well, farmers found a way to use this brand new weird poky plant and fed the young sprouts to their cattle when they ran low on feed – and other animals, like mule deer and prairie dogs, will eat them too. Other people on the frontier let them dry out, and burned the dried plants for use in soapmaking. A few indigenous tribes discovered it even had medicinal uses, and could be adapted to treat things like the flu and smallpox.

So, how can we use such a thing in magic? Well, let’s think about some of the properties of the tumbleweed – the correspondences, if you will. It’s really prickly – the sort of thing you could use to keep people off your land if you were so inclined. Near nuclear test sites in southern Nevada, there’s not a lot of plant growth… but when there is, tumbleweeds show up first. Not only that, they can grow happily in inhospitably arid environments, so they’re pretty hardy and resilient. Finally, the tumbleweed doesn’t give two damns about things like borders, fences, property lines, or anything else – you can’t keep them out. They just rollllllll on through and go wherever the hell they want, so that to me screams persistence.

All of these attributes led me to think these giant balls of ouch, sitting on my porch for the winter, will come in very handy for some full-contact defensive magic. I’ll probably take their dried out carcasses in the spring, break them into tiny pieces, and use them like this:

Sprinkle the bits around the edge of my property to keep troublemakers out – they won’t grow in the climate where I live, so I’m not worried about them taking over my yard, but if you live somewhere dry, you probably shouldn’t do this
Use in a charm bag for magical self-defense
Incorporate them into workings for persistence and perseverance
Considering how abundantly they grow and multiply in their natural habitat, this might come in useful in some prosperity magic
Use them in healing magic
Mix into an incense blend for shooing away negative energy

For more cool stuff about tumbleweeds: