For Centuries, People Thought Lambs Grew on Trees

Author: Abbey Perreault / Source: Atlas Obscura

Imagine you’re strolling through the woods in Central Asia, in a region formerly called Tartary, sometime during the Middle Ages. As you adjust your woollen cloak, you spot an eye-catching plant.

A long, swaying stalk juts out from the ground, bearing a bleating, life-sized lamb hovering a few feet off the ground.

According to ancient lore, you’ve encountered the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. Luckily there’s no need to run, as it’s solidly tethered to the ground. But though this animal-plant hybrid couldn’t go very far, the legend of it did—although completely imaginary, the vegetable lamb of Tartary crops up in ancient Hebrew texts, medieval literature, and even poetry, philosophy, and scientific musings of the Renaissance. Also called the borametz, the Scythian lamb, the lamb-tree, and the Tartarian lamb, this mythical zoophyte intrigued, inspired, and perplexed writers, philosophers, and scientists for centuries.

According to Henry Lee, a 19th-century naturalist who wrote rather extensively on the vegetable lamb, the woolly plant first appeared in literature around 436 A.D., in the Jewish text, Talmud Hierosolimitanum. According to Lee, Rabbi Jochanan included a passage detailing the plant-animal that is “in form like a lamb, and from its navel grew a stem or root by which this zoophyte … was fixed … like a gourd, to the soil below the surface of the ground.”

Later, Sir John Mandeville would refer to these creatures in his travel writings on Tartary. He refers, rather sweetly, to the lambs borne from gourd-like fruits as “little beasts,” and rather quickly follows that with, “of that fruit I have eaten.” Though we now know Mandeville wasn’t the most reliable narrator, his thoughts on the lamb-tree were taken seriously in medieval England.

In Mandeville’s imagined anatomy of the zoophyte, the plant branched out into several seed pods from which newborn lambs would spring forth. But Mandeville’s configuration wasn’t the only one in existence. In another version, each plant bore a single fully grown lamb, with a thick coat of wool “as white as snow.” The fabled creature hovered off the ground on a highly flexible stalk, which allowed it to bend deeply enough to chomp on the grass below. There was a catch to this seemingly laid-back life: Eventually, the grass would run out. Once it had devoured all the vegetation within reach, the lamb-plant would die.

Though it may have seemed helpless, swinging around aimlessly on its stem until it starved to death, procuring a vegetable lamb for one’s own was apparently a difficult task. Most iterations claim that, because the lamb could not be extracted from the plant without severing the stem, the borametz could not be hunted, except by wolves, who somehow always get the best of the poor lamb in folklore. A human looking for a leafy…

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