The Vegetable-Lamb of Tartary

Medieval Europeans lived far more isolated lives than we, and consequently, existed knowing there were vast tracts of lands and cultures to which they had no access. Tales about places necessarily depended on word-of-mouth, supplemented with rare but extremely popular travelogues. And so came to pass stories and legends about an unusual living thing, half-plant and half-animal, which was said to grow far to the east (modern Russia/Mongolia/Siberia) in a place called Tartary. It grew from a stalk, and either hatched out of pods, or just from one central stalk that acted as a kind of umbilical cord. And what blossomed Medieval people called a Barometz, a “vegetable lamb.” As the 14th-century “Travels of John Mandeville” relates: “There grew . . . . A wonderful tree, with tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie.” The Vegetable-Lamb of Tartary was considered real for hundreds of years. A belief in such a creature was augmented by the Levant cotton plant (see the last photo), unknown in Europe but used in Africa and warmer places east. The cotton tufts’ closest approximation does resemble wool. You are looking at a sort of taxiderm model of the Vegetable-Lamb, an illustration from a children’s picture book of the model, the 17th-century illustration when folks were starting to figure out what the “plant” really might have been, an illustration of the Barometz, and the Levantine cotton plant.