Q: Are tumbleweeds a specific plant or is that a generic term for any dead plant that is blown around by the wind?

A: New to these parts, stranger? Actually, so are tumbleweeds, relatively speaking.

Tumbleweeds really are a specific plant, the mature form of the Russian thistle, Salsola iberica.We think of them as being a real symbol of the West: wide-open spaces and the Sons of the Pioneers and all that. The fact of the matter is tumbleweeds are immigrants from the steppes of Asia. I didn’t know that before, even though during my Wonder Bread years I spent many extremely boring hours digging them out of the ancestral estate.

Q: Why don’t palm trees blow down in strong wind as often as other trees do?

A: I thought this was going to be an easy one, and I was prepared to pad it out with a lot of cheap jokes about my masters.

Instead, it got kind of complicated, so I had to cut out the jokes, which is just as well because I would have had to explain them to my masters anyway.

This is the deal: Palm trees are monocots as opposed to other trees, such as paloverdes or oaks, which are dicots.

Kim Stone, a horticulturist at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, went to some pains to explain the differences to me. He is a very patient man.