The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary 8, 2023

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary is a legendary zoophyte, a plant once believed to grow sheep – with blood, bones and flesh – as its fruit. Bizarre to us today, understanding where tufts of cotton came from in Europe – far from the origin of the plant in India, but nearer to Mesopotamia, where the sheep had become commonplace livestock – led to the theory of an incredible creature. Connected to the plant by an umbilical-like cord or stem, it was thought that the sheep grazed the land around the plant until nothing remained, at which point both sheep and plant died. The cotton plant was unknown in Northern Europe before the Norman conquest of Sicily between 1061 and 1091.