Imagine a species of creature that sprouts from the earth. Hatched from no egg, born from no mother, they grow on trees or vines. You might initially mistake their kind for oranges or exotic gourds. But remove the outer shell of one and there you will find more than pulp, seeds, or pith. Something rustles, white and innocent, as soft as wool. A lamblike thing winks up at you.

This is how the species known variously as the “boramets”, “borametz”, “barometz”, or the “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary” was first depicted by European writers in the Middle Ages. But the system of categorization that made such an animal-plant hybrid scientifically feasible is much older. The natural history of the vegetable lamb bears a peculiar kinship to that of corals and anemones. All are “zoophytes”: a category that emerged in antiquity for organisms displaying both plant and animal qualities. The classification schema known as The Great Chain of Being once divided the world into minerals, plants, animals, and men. Aristotle noted the existence of creatures that complicated such distinctions — “Nature passes so gradually from inanimate to animate things, that from their continuity their boundary and the mean between them is indistinct” — but he remained firm on the impossibility of a fixed, terrestrial being: “some creatures which are stationary, while others are locomotive; the fixed animals are aquatic, but this is not the case with any of the inhabitants of the land.”¹ Other ancient naturalists followed suit. In a treatise on stones, Aristotle’s student Theophrastus expressed an uncertainty about whether coral should be classified as a mineral or a plant, while Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, written centuries later, placed corals between plants and animals. During the Roman Empire, the zoophyte was a known quantity, even if its actual referents remained murky.

The chimerical category continued to preoccupy naturalists in the Middle Ages. Sessile marine organisms served as its prime example, but others forgot Aristotle’s dictum regarding terrestrial fixity and fantasized about a paradigmatic zoophyte that would be at once a lamb and a plant. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1357–1371), a fantastical account of an Englishman’s encounters in the Near and Far East, is largely recognized as the first medieval source to visually illustrate the vegetable lamb for a European audience. The floral body differs across manuscripts but often branches symmetrically, with two or four pods sprouting miniature, happy lambs. The illustrations complement Mandeville’s description of the kingdom of Caldilhe in India as rich in animal-plants that resemble a kind of gourd. “And when they be ripe, men cut them a-two, and men find within a little beast, in flesh, in bone, and blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool”. Here, the vegetable lamb is a kind of stone fruit, but in place of a pit, there is a small bleating beast. “And men eat both the fruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel. Of that fruit I have eaten, although it were wonderful, but that I know well that God is marvellous in his works.”²

Some of Mandeville’s account is thought to come from a manuscript credited to the Minorite friar Odoric of Pordenone, who took a journey contemporaneous with the Englishman’s supposed own. Returning to Europe in 1330, Odoric described his visit to a place known as “Grand Can”, where he talked to “persons worthy of credit”. Near the mountain of Capsius in the Kalor province, they recall seeing gourds that contain “a little beast like unto a young lamb”. Odoric proceeds to compare the wondrous story to events closer to home, namely the mythic barnacle goose: “I myself have heard reported that there stand certain trees upon the shore of the Irish Sea bearing fruits like unto a gourd, which at a certain time of the year do fall into the water and become birds called Bernacles; and this is true.”³

Skepticism emerged quickly. The Italian polymath Gerolamo Cardano filed numerous objections in his 1557 De Rerum Natura, such as: how can this organism bleed, if it doesn’t have a heart? Nevertheless, he remained open to the existence of a terrestrial zoophyte, if the climate was right: “where the atmosphere was thick and dense there might, perhaps, be a plant having sensation, and also imperfect flesh, such as that of mollusks and fishes.”⁴ This left him receptive to mockery by his colleagues. That same year, the Italian scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger ridiculed the vegetable lamb even as he contributed to the legend’s textual record, classifying it as lusus naturae, monstrous phenomena not possible within the order of nature.⁵ For Scaliger, the “wonderful Tartar plant” grows three feet in height and has “the likeness of a real lamb, having feet, hoofs, ears, and a head perfect with the exception of horns, instead of which the plant has hairs in the form of horns.” Its vegetable-meat tastes less like fruit than “the flesh of the cray-fish”. It bleeds real blood. Scaliger adds other colorful details, stressing the plant’s lamblike nature: it grazes like a sheep, albeit on a fixed leash — “whilst the plant is surrounded with herbage it lives as does a lamb, but as soon as it has consumed all within its reach it withers and dies” — and its only natural predator is the wolf. Despite contributing to its ethology, Scaliger ends his description with disbelief, trained at Cardano: “I would like to know from you how four distinct legs and their feet can be produced from one stem”.⁶

Where Mandeville and Odoric found several fruiting lambs per plant, other early modern naturalists took Cardano and Scaliger’s position and recorded only one. In the striking visual tradition that accompanies these accounts, the lambs are larger, one per plant, perching improbably on top of a surprisingly durable stalk. The French botanist Claude Duret (ca. 1570–1611) marveled at such an organism in his 1605 treatise Histoire admirable des plantes. Inhabiting “Scythia or Tartary”, a vague region lying somewhere between the Volga and Ural rivers and near the Caspian Sea, this Agnus scythicus grew a full-bodied lamb, whose bones offered the powers of divination to those who placed them in their mouths. Duret himself never observed the organism firsthand, but relies upon “a very ancient Hebrew book entitled in Latin the Talmud Ierosolimitanum, and written by a Jewish Rabbi Jochanan, assisted by others, in the year of salvation 436” for the following description:

It was in form like a lamb, and from its navel grew a stem or root by which this zoophyte or plant-animal was fixed, attached, like a gourd, to the soil below the surface of the ground, and, according to the length of its stem or root, it devoured all the herbage which it was able to reach within the circle of its tether. The hunters who went in search of this creature were unable to capture or remove it until they had succeeded in cutting the stem by well-aimed arrows or darts, when the animal immediately fell prostrate to the earth and died. Its bones being placed with certain ceremonies and incantations in the mouth of one desiring to foretell the future, he was instantly seized with a spirit of divination, and endowed with the gift of prophecy.⁷

Unlike Mandeville’s supposed eyewitness account, Duret’s description of this “singularly admirable and almost incredible” creature leans heavily on the authority of historical sources and erudite precursors. These include: a Rabbi Simeon, who may have been the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, traditionally credited with compiling the Kabbalistic Zohar, as well as Sigismund von Herberstein, ambassador to the Duke of Muscovy in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Von Herberstein, in turn, heard about the vegetable lamb from a man called Demetrius Daniel. This style of reliance on hearsay is common in medieval and early modern natural histories and bestiaries, which often lacked anatomical or even taxonomic classification but made sure to include stories, fables, and the legendary properties of the entities they described.⁸ In Cardano’s words, “we receive no less benefits from fables, than histories.”⁹

Other naturalists had other theories — adjudicating the vegetable lamb’s existence became a who’s who of early modern science: Fortunio Liceti, Francis Bacon, Giambattista della Porta, and Athanasius Kircher all weighed in. For Bacon, “the Figure maketh the Fable”: the vegetable lamb’s qualities were exaggerated aspects of a real plant. But those closer to the supposed source were more skeptical still.¹⁰ “Perhaps in some histories of these parts, you may have heard of a vegetative Lamb which devours all the grass about it, and then dyes”, wrote the physician Samuel Collins from Moscow to Robert Boyle, father of modern chemistry and co-founder of the Royal Society. “Fables, which have not the least shadow of truth.”¹¹

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the vegetable lamb leapt off the pages of natural historical description and into Baroque cabinets of curiosity. Preserved specimens from Tartary began appearing in European collections, alongside geodes, starfish, fossils, animal skulls, amulets, shrunken heads, and any other imponderabilia that caught a collector’s eye. In 1698, the Irish naturalist Sir Hans Sloane saw one of these specimens up close and looked at it awry. He had obtained the alleged corpse, preserved through desiccation, from one Mr. Buckley, Chief Surgeon at Fort St. George, East Indies, who had shipped it in a cabinet of various Chinese medical instruments and curios from the city known today as Chennai, India. Sloane noted that this specimen’s supposed feet looked “exactly like the foot-stalks of ferns, both without and within”, and that the supposed wool was nothing more than the fine rhizomes of this fern. He offered that such vegetable tufts, natural anticoagulants, were used in places like Jamaica to stop bleeding. Sloane is the first to suggest that vegetable lambs may merely be fern root clusters, dried and crafted into lamblike shapes to satisfy the curiosity of gullible Europeans. “It seem’d to be shap’d by Art to imitate a Lamb, the Roots or climbing part is made to resemble the Body, and the extant Foot-stalks the Legs.”¹²

Where Sloane found a hoax, his contemporary, Engelbert Kaempfer, saw euphemism. The German naturalist and physician had traveled with a diplomatic entourage to Persia in 1683 and worked as a surgeon for the Dutch East India Company thereafter. During this time, he searched for the vegetable lamb “ad risum et nauseam” but never encountered a “zoophyte feeding on grass”.¹³ Instead, he returned with a theory regarding astrachan, the tightly curled fleece of newborn or fetal Karakul lambs, treasured by those wealthy and powerful enough to acquire superior textiles for their clothes. What if such a material was different enough in quality as to be imagined as differing in origin, shorn not from a baby sheep but from a vegetable lamb? The pelts of these slaughtered, unborn Karakul lambs were uncommonly soft, and the tanned hide so thin as to not seem like leather at all. The “vegetable lamb”, for Kaempfer, becomes a kind of fig leaf for making palatable the off-putting way this luxurious wool was sourced.

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant (1887) by the English naturalist Henry Lee — director of the Bristol Aquarium and an outspoken skeptic of krakens, sea serpents, and other marine cryptozoa — offers the most thorough debunking of the ovine zoophyte. An elegant popular-scientific thinker in his own right, Lee builds on Sloane and Kaempfer’s theories to offer his own interpretation of the true referent of the creature. Returning to John Mandeville’s late-medieval visual imagination, he argues that this was all a misapprehension of the simple cotton shrub. Lee finds the trope as far back as Herodotus’ Histories: “Certain trees bear for their fruit fleeces surpassing those of sheep in beauty and excellence, and the natives clothe themselves in cloths made therefrom”.¹⁴ The vegetable lamb was birthed by the novelty of cotton in the European imagination, he continues, a plant that was cultivated for its fibers in Egypt up to the seventh century, but whose range receded to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent thereafter. “The first rumour concerning cotton — that ‘wool as white and soft as that of a lamb grew on trees’ — was exaggerated to a statement that ‘lambs grew on certain trees,’ and were, therefore, partly animal and partly vegetable.”¹⁵

Even as it was being debunked all around, the vegetable lamb showed an uncanny tenacity for survival. When Carl Linnaeus introduced his system of binomial nomenclature for the classification of plants in his 1753 Species Plantarum, he used the mythical organism’s name for the Chinese woolly fern from which phony zoophytes had been crafted. The fern species responsible is known as Cibotium barometz to this day. An entry about the Agnus scythicus even appears in Diderot’s Encyclopédie — mostly as an example of superstitious hoaxes to be discarded. The author of the quite lengthy entry demurs on the question of the creature’s existence by distinguishing between ordinary beings and miraculous ones, offering a primer in the virtues of empirical observation. Here, the borametz occasions a rather involved articulation of the encyclopédistes’ method. If we want to dwell in reality, and not give ourselves up to dreams, we must finally lay the lamb to rest.

Here then is all the wonder of the Scythian lamb reduced to nothing, or at least to very little, to a hairy root which people twist and turn to make it look a little like a lamb. . . . We must consider if the evidence comes from people who were actually present at the scene they are describing. We must ask what risks they took in telling others about events which they claimed to have witnessed at first hand. It must be admitted that if individuals have put their lives at risk by affirming the truth of their testimony, then it will acquire a great force — and even more so when they have actually sacrificed and lost their lives. . . . We must not confuse an event which occurred before the eyes of an entire people, with one which was only witnessed by a small number of individuals. . . . If we do not want to give ourselves up to dreams, if we are sincere in our love of truth, then these are some of the principles we must apply when deciding whether to believe or disbelieve.¹⁶