Vegetable Lamb
Thursday Mini-Curio #9 (20/3/2025)
Woolly…Veggies?
I talked about the vegetable lamb when introducing the medieval marvel, and cited John Mandeville, perhaps Europe’s most influential and popular premodern travel-writer.
What is a vegetable lamb? Well, from Greco-Roman times, through the Middle Ages, and into the Early Modern Period it was a wonder—lambs literally growing from plants. A “joke of nature” too.
Marvels like this tended to move around the map, to different peripheries (according to the European worldview), after people went searching for them and their alleged location was disproved—the vegetable lamb was associated with Scythia and then with Tartary, and at times “the Indias”. Interesting though that the most prevalent associations were with countries whose cultures were semi-nomadic horse riders.
It’s a fun curio anyway, but take a look at this. There is a tropical fern, Cibotium barometz, also called the woolly fern and golden chicken fern native to the Malay peninsula. The fern gets its fun names and its spotlight today because the rhizome (a semi-subterranean stem), is a very likely explanation for the vegetable lamb. One sample straight up looks like a faked cryptid taxidermy. So cool!
Hans Sloane made this point in an essay in 1698, but people still sought the vegetable lamb right into the Victorian age.
I suggested before that the vegetable lamb = cotton, but this is fern even more plausible. The best part about marvels is that “proving” the source for them, whilst a fun mystery, is not really the point—it’s more about learning how historical people thought about the world. So, fun either way, and I’m sure many little tidbits rolled into one to leave us with this striking marvel.
I do not own the images shared in this post.