The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, also called Borametz and Polypodium Borametz, or “Chinese polypody,” is a plant shaped like a lamb, covered in golden fluff. It stands on four or five roots; the plants around it die, yet it remains lush; when cut, it releases a bloody juice (…) In other monsters, species or animal genera are combined; in the Borametz, the plant and animal kingdoms are joined.

This literary excerpt is from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. However, the Argentine writer was not the one who conceived of this creature; it has been talked about for many centuries, and not as a fictional being but as real. Indeed, its existence was believed in to the point that, in 1751, Diderot and D’Alembert included it in the first edition of their famous Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, a hallmark work of the Enlightenment, under the entry Agnus scythicus, though it’s true they clarified that it was simply a plant.

The French were not the only encyclopedists; nor were they the first. In fact, they were inspired by the French translation of the Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, a work published twenty-three years earlier by the Englishman Ephraim Chambers, a globe maker turned author/editor who had, in turn, translated French scientific texts. In the Cyclopaedia, he included an entry under the same heading as Diderot, Agnus scythicus, which referred to a zoophyte (an animal with plant characteristics) with the appearance of a lamb living in Tartary. Other names given were Agnus vegetabilis and Agnus tartaricus, as well as endonyms like Borometz, Borametz, and Boranetz.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
An engraving from 1605 depicts the vegetable lamb as it was conceived at the time. Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

What did this plant have to originate such a true legend? How did it come to be believed that it had the extraordinary ability to yield sheep instead of fruits? It’s worth noting that there are documented references from the 14th century, which is no coincidence; it was in this century that a book published in 1298 by Rustichello of Pisa was widely circulated. Rustichello, a Pisan writer imprisoned that year due to the war between the republics of Venice and Genoa, was sharing a cell with a Venetian traveler named Marco Polo. It would be Marco who dictated his adventures to him—although Rustichello enhanced them with those of others—so that the original title of the work, Il Milione, eventually became known as The Travels of Marco Polo.

Il Milione has also often been retitled as The Book of Wonders because it opened up the unknown world of the Far East to Western readers but included not a few fantasies: Christians astonishing the Caliph of Baghdad by moving mountains with their prayers, savage and cannibal tribes worshipping animals, a lone and dry tree marking the end of the world, the exact spot where Noah’s Ark touched ground after the Great Flood, a princess who dueled her suitors before marriage, the survival of the enigmatic kingdom of Prester John among the infidels, an island inhabited by men with dog-like heads…

Many of these imaginings were an inheritance of earlier medieval legends, which also left a mark on authors like Odoric of Pordenone, Pierre D’Ailly, or John Mandeville—all consulted, like Marco Polo, by Christopher Columbus while he was planning his journey to reveal the New World’s existence to Europe. Indeed, it’s shortly after Columbus’s arrival in America that accounts of the mysterious vegetable lamb begin to spread, undoubtedly aided by the generalization of the printing press, to the point that its existence became a subject of heuristic debate, both scientific and philosophical, in discussions about the natural order of things and the Aristotelian scale of beings.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Adam and Eve in the Earthly Paradise, in a 1629 engraving by Christopher Switzer showing a specimen of Vegetable Lamb. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The baron Sigismund von Herberstein, who served as ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire (under Maximilian I and Charles V) to Russia between 1517 and 1526, published a book in 1549 titled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (“Comments on Muscovite Affairs”), which became the principal source for understanding the Tsar’s country in various areas, from politics to geography and ethnography. In this text, Sigismund claimed to have heard of the vegetable lamb too often not to take it seriously, placing its location near the Caspian Sea, between the Ural and Volga rivers.

The German diplomat said that the plant grew from seeds resembling those of a melon and reached a height of two and a half feet, taking on a lamb-like form but with hoofed fur. It had blood, but the flesh was more similar to that of a crab, though many animals, mainly wolves, considered it a delicacy. It’s possible that this description inspired the Gascon poet Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas for his poem La Semaine, published in 1587, where an Adam strolling through the Garden of Eden encounters the strange plant:

But with the real beasts that still cling to the ground / nourished by grass and licking the dampness in the air, / like those raised by Borametz in Scythia from slender seeds and fed with green forage; / although their bodies, noses, mouths, and eyes / have the full form and appearance of newborn lambs, / they should be real lambs, except for the leg. / Inside the ground, they are fixed by a living root / that grows in their navel and dies the day they’ve grazed the nearby grass. / Oh! Wonderful Nature of God, only good, / the beast has a root, the plant has flesh and blood. / The agile plant can spin it from side to side, / the numb beast cannot move or walk, / the plant has no leaves, no branches, no fruit, / the beast has no lust, no sex, no fire, mute: / the plant feeds its hungry belly on plants.

Nevertheless, all those peculiar characteristics had been known long before. It is possible to trace back as far as the 5th century BCE to find what might be the origin of the myth. In Jewish folklore, there was a being called Yeduah, shaped like a sheep and born from the ground, remaining connected to it by a stem. It was hunted (or should we say harvested?) to use its bones in divination rituals. An alternative version spoke of Faduah, a plant with a human shape that killed anyone who approached it and, as in the previous case, would die if its stem was cut.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Portrait of Sigismund von Herberstein dressed in Russian style. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Even Herodotus, around the same time, described the existence in India of a tree whose fruit is wool surpassing that of sheep in beauty and quality and, therefore, was used by people to make their clothing. However, the location doesn’t always refer to exotic lands. Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan missionary who spent twelve years traveling through Southeast Asia and China, recounted that the first time he heard about the vegetable lamb was on the coast of the Irish Sea (the sea between this island and Great Britain), although the creature in question showed some differences: it was a tree whose fruits were shaped like pumpkins and, upon falling into the water, transformed into birds known as barnacle geese.

Today, we call the barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) a type of goose typical of northern Europe, Scandinavia, and Greenland. The lack of knowledge at that time about bird migration led to the belief in a fantastic origin: a mix of plant and animal, the Tree-Barnacle (barnacle in English means goose barnacle) dropped its fruits into the sea surrounding the Orkney Islands (north of Scotland) where they continued an underwater life as barnacles until, upon maturing, they transformed into geese. It’s worth noting that Hebrew mythology suggested something similar, and medieval bestiaries adopted the concept.

In De arte venandi cum avibus (“On the Art of Hunting with Birds”), a work written by the scholarly emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen around 1241, one can read: Many times have I seen with my own eyes more than a thousand tiny embryos of birds of this species on the seashore, hanging from a single piece of driftwood, covered in shells and already formed. However, the emperor clarified that the barnacle goose story was mere superstition that different authors had repeated over the centuries. Such is the case of Gerald of Wales, secretary and chaplain to King Henry II of England, who, speaking about Ireland in his Topographia Hibernica (1187), wrote:

There are many birds called barnacles (bernacae)… nature produces them in a miraculous way as they begin as gum on driftwood fir floating in the sea. Then they cling to their beaks as to the driftwood, attach to it, and enclose themselves in sea shells for freer development… thus, over time, dressed in a firm coat of feathers, they fall into the water or fly inland (…) In some parts of Ireland, bishops and the religious have no qualms about eating these birds on fast days since they are not flesh, as they do not originate from flesh.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
The myth of the barnacle goose captured in a medieval bestiary preserved in the British Library. Credit: Ray Oaks / Wikimedia Commons

As can be seen, the matter had religious implications to such an extent that at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) an attempt was made to establish a canon clearly distinguishing between meat and fish; according to some sources, it ended up including barnacles in the first group, thus banning their consumption during Lent, although official documents not only omit any mention of this prohibition but suggest that the debate applied to other species. Even so, Cardinal Enea Silvio Bartolomeo, the future Pope Pius II, visited Scotland and Ireland in 1435 to seek their support against the French in the Hundred Years’ War and published a book about his experience, De Europa, in which he insisted on the subject:

We heard that in Scotland there was once a tree growing on the riverbank that bore fruit in the shape of ducks. When they were almost ripe, they would fall on their own, some to the ground and others to the water. Those that landed on the ground rotted, but those that sank into the water instantly came back to life, swam from underwater, and immediately flew through the air, equipped with feathers and wings. When I eagerly investigated this matter, I discovered that miracles always recede farther away, and that the famous tree was not in Scotland but in the Orkney Islands.

The prelate offers a key insight: such myths, no matter where they are heard, always trace their origin to a more distant place. In this sense, the introduction of the legend of the vegetable lamb in Europe is believed to be due to another book, anonymous and written between 1357 and 1371, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (The Travels of John Mandeville, also titled Book of the Marvels of the World). Its protagonist, a knight named Mandeville, recounts what he saw over thirty-four years traveling the world, adding that he brought from Tartary a strange fruit shaped like a pumpkin that, when ripe, opened to reveal a sort of woolless sheep.

As we have seen, over time, that image evolved into another one in which the being was no longer simply the fruit of a plant but the plant itself, perhaps influenced by the Chinese legend of the aquatic sheep. Collected by the Dutch sinologist and naturalist Gustav Schelegel in his book The Shui-yang or Watersheep and the Agnus Scythicus or Vegetable Lamb (1892), it explains that it was a plant that was both animal and vegetable that inhabited Persia and was rooted to the ground through a stem. If this stem was cut, it would die, but people protected it because they used its wool. It is believed that the Chinese developed this figure out of a need to explain the mystery of sea silk.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
A karakul lambskin (astrakhan). Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

And indeed, everything usually has an explanation. Thus, as we entered the seventeenth century, when Asia and the Americas were beginning to be better known thanks to trade relations with Europe, a reasonable skepticism began raising the first doubts. Thomas Browne, a multidisciplinary scholar inspired by the Scientific Revolution spurred by Francis Bacon, published in 1646 his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (“Researches on Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths”), a work in which he methodically and categorically debunked several legends of the time, including that of the vegetable lamb.

In 1683, Engelbert Kaempfer was the next to express doubts, joining an embassy sent by the Swedish King Charles XI to Persia with the aim of seeing a specimen of the Tartar lamb in person. Kaempfer, a native of Westphalia, was a physician who, as was customary at the time, encompassed various fields of knowledge to attain erudition: naturalism, geography… Once in Persian territory, after much searching, he did not find what he was looking for and concluded that it was merely a legendary figure; instead, he saw things that he reasoned could be its origin.

He observed that a local custom involved extracting unborn lambs from the wombs of their mothers to utilize their soft wool, as has been done for three and a half millennia to this day in the Bukhara region (Uzbekistan) with Karakul sheep, which are sometimes sacrificed, induced to premature birth, or even aborted to obtain the prized skins of their young (black and curly) for making astrakhan garments, such as the famous karakul hat worn by Uzbek, Afghan, Pakistani, and other Asian Muslim communities. Additionally, Kaempfer noted the vegetal appearance of the fetal wool samples.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
A specimen of Cibotium barometz. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Fifteen years later, the Irishman Sir Hans Sloane proposed another hypothesis on the genesis of the legend. Sloane, another physician and naturalist, famous for creating milk chocolate and whose collection of plant specimens would become the nucleus of the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in London, believed it all stemmed from a Chinese tree fern he had found in a curiosity cabinet brought from that country, which he purchased. It was what we now know as Cibotium barometz, a dicksoniaceous plant that can reach a meter in height, though it is often inclined downward.

This inclination now recalls the description made in 1887 by the English naturalist Henry Lee in his book The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, in which, describing the peculiarities attributed to the vegetable lamb of Tartary (which had blood, flesh, and bones; whose offspring were like its living members, thus dying if separated from it; whose blood tasted like honey; and whose main predators were wolves, though it would die naturally when it had consumed all the vegetation around it), he specified that it was connected to the earth by a flexible stem resembling an umbilical cord that allowed it to bend down to graze.

Lee, a member of London’s Linnean Society, Geological Society, and Zoological Society, was highly skeptical of cryptozoology, which linked him to Sloane, whom he cites in this regard in his book. Sloane, he says, identified Cibotium barometz as the legendary source because he observed that when a piece of rhizome (the underground stem with several buds that grows horizontally, producing roots and herbaceous shoots at its nodes, which act as nutrient reservoirs) was removed, it resembled a woolly lamb, with the cut bases of the petiole resembling legs.

Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Plate by W.G.Smith for the Swedish magazine Svenska Familj-Journalen showing the confusion generated by the plants of Cibotium barometz (1879). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Science was prevailing over tradition, as naturalism—making a major leap forward between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—surpassed poetry. Sometimes, an attempt was made at syncretism, and Erasmus Darwin, paternal grandfather of the formulator of the theory of evolution, compiled two of his poetry books (The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants) in 1781 into an unusual book titled The Botanic Garden, which featured some lovely verses about the extraordinary creature we are discussing:

Cradled in snow and quickened by the Arctic air, / shines, gentle borametz, thy golden hair. / Rooted in earth, each cloven foot descends, / and twisting and turning its flexible neck bends, / cultivating coral moss and hoary thyme, / or licking with pink tongue the melting rime; / gazing with mute tenderness at its distant prey, / and seeming to bleat a vegetable lamb.

A decade later, the Frenchman Demetrius de La Croix and the baron Richardus Clayton also contributed a lyrical note to the subject, perfect for ending:

For in his path he sees a monstrous birth, / the Borametz rises from the earth. / Upon a stalk stands a living brute, / a rooted plant yields a quadruped fruit (…) / It’s an animal that sleeps by day / and awakens at night, though rooted in the ground, / to graze on grass within its reach around.

And as we find ourselves in the prosaic twenty-first century, a scientific epilogue: besides Cibotium barometz, the possibility of the Gossypium genus is also currently considered, as these herbaceous plants and shrubs are used to produce cotton (whose fluff is called “borra,” like lambs between one and two years old) and were unknown in northern Europe before the Norman conquest of Sicily in the eleventh century.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 11, 2024: La extraña leyenda del cordero vegetal de Tartaria

SOURCES

John Mandeville, The travels of Sir John Mandeville

Malcolm Eded (trad.), Agnus scythicus

Henry Lee, The vegetable lamb of Tartaria

Thomas Brown, Sobre errores vulgares o Pseudodoxia epidemica

Cailin O’Connor y James Orwell Weatherhall, The misinformation age. How false beliefs spread

Kristen Minogue, Science, Superstition and the Goose Barnacle

Wikipedia, Cordero vegetal de Tartaria

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