Imagine a plant that grows….lambs instead of fruits??
The Middle Ages is infamous for wild myths, but nothing could be more bizarre than the legend of “The vegetable lamb of Tartary,” a peculiar plant that produced fruit resembling a lamb with legs, hooves, ears, and head.
Guess this was the OG plant-based protein!!
According to scholars, this zoophyte (a plantlike animal) was a fruit from a tree that sprang from a seed similar to a melon or gourd. When the fruit became fully ripe, it burst open and revealed within it a lamb, resembling a naturally born lamb.
This legend had a backstory! Known as the “Scythian Lamb” and the “Barometz,” this creature was allegedly native to Tartary, a region in Central Asia surrounded by the Caspian Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Ural Mountains. For 4 centuries (from the 13th through the 17th) people believed that this half-plant, half-animal was real! Back in the Middle Ages, being superstitious was just part of everyday life, so it was pretty easy for people to believe stories like this one.
The story of the plant bearing lambs as fruits was first brought to public notice in the reign of King Edward III of England by legendary traveller Sir John Mandeville. He describes a magical tree in India sprouting adorable little lambs from its branches. According to Mandeville’s wild account, these branches were so flexible they would actually bend down, allowing the lamb fruits to graze when hungry( Now that’s what you call a “flexible” diet).
Another version of the story gets even weirder.
Some said that the lamb was not the product of a tree but rather a living lamb attached from its navel to a short stem in the soil. The stem on which the lamb was suspended above the ground was flexible enough to allow the animal to graze on the pasture within its reach. When all the grass within the length of its tether had been consumed, the lamb died and the stem withered. Since the plant was reported to have flesh, blood and bones, the wolves would devour it (apparently, no other carnivore seemed to attack the lamb plant). Sounds like a plant straight out of Grimm’s fairy tale, right??
In the Paradisi in sole Paradisius Terrestris (1629), the earliest landmark treatise on Horticulture, the title page depicts the garden of Paradise with Adam and Eve along with various flora including the creature Barometz, the sheep tethered by its navel. This celebrates God’s creation of nature. The vegetable sheep was often mistakenly thought of as the plant that produces cotton.
Here’s where it gets very funny— the Scythian sheep became a big and profitable business between Asia and Europe until the 1700s. Clever eastern traders were selling lamb plants made from the hairy roots of an Asian fern(Cibotium barometz).
During the Renaissance era, people were really into strange and magical creatures. The Lamb of Tartary wasn’t just seen as something extraordinary, but as a way to understand the hierarchy of nature and Aristotle’s ideas about different kinds of living organisms.
Medieval and Renaissance intellectuals weren’t just swapping crazy stories, they were conducting real research. Each scholar brought their own twist.
The Italian Polymath Girolamo Cardano (1550s) dismissed the vegetable lamb as a fable, rejecting its existence, and suggesting that plants are physiologically different from animals.
Italian scholar and physician Julius Caesar Scaliger (1557) refuted Cardano’s arguments passionately while describing the lamb as a fantastic creature connected to a plant by its navel, surviving by grazing nearby herbs.
In his book Phytogonomica, the Italian polymath Giovanni Battista Della Porta described a peculiar plant from Tartary that bears tasty, lamb-like fruits and has juices that resemble blood and have healing properties.
The Italian physician Fortunio Liceti (1618) thought the vegetable lamb was a “zoophyte” – part plant, part animal. The German philosopher Athanasius Kircher (1654) compared the vegetable lamb to plant-like animals, describing its features using natural analogies rather than exotic claims.
By the late 17th century, people started questioning whether the vegetable lamb was real, mostly because of stories from Asian travellers. Even though some thought that Tartary Lamb was just a mere myth or a legend, there was some doubt to spark curiosity. It turned into a pretty fascinating topic for anyone wanting to delve deeper into the world of plants.
References:
Lee, H., 1997. The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Vol. 7). Рипол Классик.
Tryon, A.F., 1957. The vegetable lamb of Tartary. American Fern Journal, 47(1), pp.1-7.
Baldassarri, F., 2021. The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: Renaissance Philosophy, Magic, and Botany.
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