One plant bears a host of provocative names: the Vegetable Lamb, Lamb of Tartary, Scythian Lamb (or Agnus scythicus), and, scientifically, Cibotium barometz, the species epithet of which, “barometz,” is a Tartarian word for—yes, that’s right—“lamb.” Yet, as the above images attest, this is no ordinary lamb, which, admittedly, would have been sorely out of place in an exhibition about plants. Yet, neither is it any old ordinary plant. For a long time, it was thought to be a zoophyte, that is, an animal-plant, an explanation that seems to raise more questions than answers. What, then, was this Vegetable Lamb thought to be? And what is it thought to be today?

The first question, strangely enough, might be easier to answer than the second. In 1624, Edward Smythe wrote a striking account of the Vegetable Lamb, though this description was not the intention of his article; rather, he was interested in recording the “rarity and worth” of a holding in the Library of Oxford, that is, a long cloak made from the Vegetable Lamb that had belonged to Sir Richard Lee, who, in turn, had obtained it from the King of Sweden. Before this garment came to be, then, it was first a Lamb of Tartary, which Smythe describes as follows:

There did ... grow out of the ground certain living creatures in the shape of lambs, bearing wool upon them, very like to the lambs of England, in this manner; viz., a stalk like the stalk of an artichoke did grow up out of the ground, and upon the top thereof a bud, which by degree did grow into the shape of a lamb, and become a living creature, resting upon the stalk by the navel; and as soon as did come to life it would eat of the grass growing round about it, and when it had eaten up the grass within its reach it would die. And then the people of the country as they find these lambs do flay their skins, which they preserve and keep, esteeming them to be of excellent use and virtue, especially against the plague and other noisome diseases of those countries.

This incredible description reveals that this plant’s names were not mere metaphors, but rather literal descriptions. The Vegetable Lamb is a lamb, one that grows from the ground as a plant does. It is attached to a stalk like an artichoke, and, according to Smythe and others, as soon as the patch of vegetation around it was eaten, it would promptly die. The earliest records of the plant date from the fourteenth century. In the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, whose authorship is contested, an account is given of the lamb similar to that of Smythe, except, rather than prizing its fur, the author praises its fruit, the lamb. And the reviews were in: “all thought it were wonderful.”

Versions of this account lived on until the eighteenth century, when naturalists began to challenge its veracity. The eminent botanist, Sir Hans Sloane, offered one of the strongest and earliest efforts to debunk the Lamb of Tartary, after he received a specimen from Fort St. George (now Chennai, India). The first illustration above is from this 1698 repudiation, in which Sloane chalks up the dried specimen of the Vegetable Lamb wholly to artifice. He says that the roots of a fern were shaped into the body and its footstalks (petioles) into legs. The process that Sloane described actually continues to this day in Asia (as seen in the final image above), where you can buy your own souvenir Vegetable Lamb, usually found with the addition of ears and tail made from the fern’s dried fiddleheads. As Sloane and Darwin also relate, the fur of the Vegetable Lamb was used to stanch bleeding, a practice that also continues to this day in Asia.

Sloane’s debunkery continued to find corroboration throughout the eighteenth century, as more and more naturalists confirmed that the Vegetable Lamb was not an animal at all, but just a fern, C. barometz. By the time that Darwin wrote his verse, there would have been no mistaking it: the Lamb of Tartary was a fable; only a furry fern actually exists. Darwin qualifies his verse by writing that there “seems to bleat a Vegetable Lamb.” There is not truly one. Nevertheless, the fern provokes Darwin to ask why this plant needs fur, for, after all, C. barometz really does have fur. Darwin seems to presume that the plant grows in the Arctic or at least in a cold climate. In order to protect itself, he reasons, the fern grows fur to keep warm. It is insulation. Unfortunately for Darwin, C. barometz is a tropical and subtropical fern, meaning that it would never need to insulate itself from the arctic climate Darwin imagines. Despite this geographical confusion, his question is an interesting one. We do not often meet with plants so furry that they could be confused with lambs. Does C. barometz’s fur, if not for insulation, have some other purpose? No definitive answer is forthcoming, yet scientists think that the furs protect the fern against insect damage and (when young) from abrasion while the leaf or rhizome is pushing through the soil. In any case, Darwin was right that the fur is protective, but was just wrong about where, why, and how. The devil is always in the details!

In 1887, Henry Lee, a nineteenth-century myth-buster, further complicates the purported origin of the myth in the fern. He argues that the Vegetable Lamb began, not because of a fern, but rather because of the cotton plant. Sloane may have identified the source of his specimen, but he had not identified the true source of the fabulous creature. Lee marshals an army of evidence in support of his position. He thinks that Sloane’s specimen, for instance, as an Asian trinket, was never intended to look like a lamb, and was only fashioned as such ex post facto. Moreover, he argues that the geography does not line up, nor do the historical accounts represent C. barometz’s physiology. Lee insists the better candidate is cotton. It fits better, corroborating the original myths, descriptions of physiology, and historical facts. Lee concludes, “It seems to me to be clear and indubitable that the fruit which burst when ripe and disclosed within it ‘a little lamb’ was the cotton pod, and that the soft, white, delicate fleece of ‘the Vegetable Lamb of Scythia’ was that which we still call ‘Cotton Wool’” (p. 60).

Is the cotton plant the origin of Vegetable Lamb? While this hypothesis is certainly plausible, it is by no means unassailable. Richard Mabey reminds us that Lee had a complicated interest in the cotton plant, in that he ends his myth-busting work with “an impassioned plea for Britain’s retention of India and of the huge wealth represented by its cotton plantations” The Cabaret of Plants, 2015). Mabey is also dubious whether the cotton plant would have been unfamiliar enough to Europe at the time that the myth was taking hold to warrant the Vegetable Lamb myth. If nothing else, it seems quite possible that the Lamb of Tartary could stem from more than one plant, only adding to the ambiguity of (an) already ambiguous plant(s).