The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: The Medieval Plant That Grew Sheep
Somewhere in the steppes beyond the Volga—in "Tartary," that vast elastic country where medieval Europe stored everything it could not verify—there grew, on the best authority, a plant whose fruit was a living lamb . The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary —the Borametz or barometz , from the Tatar word for lamb—sprouted from a seed like a melon's; its stalk rose waist-high; and at the top, attached by its navel to the stem as fruit to the vine, grew a perfect lamb : flesh, blood, bone, and a fleece of extraordinary whiteness. The lamb-plant lived bent to its tether: it grazed the grass within the circle of its stalk , cropping everything its stem allowed it to reach; and when the circle was bare—the stalk's radius exhausted—plant and lamb together died. Wolves loved its flesh, which tasted (travelers agreed, at various removes from anyone who had tasted it) like crab or like lamb itself; its blood ran sweet like honey; men prized the fleece and the bones for divination and f...