Medieval bestiaries were filled with all sorts of fantastical creatures based on distorted accounts of real animals and plants. One of these was the vegetable lamb. Medieval Europeans did not really understand where cotton came from, but since it was similar to wool they believed that the cotton plant grew lambs. This is an excellent plant to populate the fantasy world! What follows is my attempt at an ecology for this plant.
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| ©2015 Deimos-Remus |
The cotton plant is native to the regions of Scythia and Tartary. The plant itself is unremarkable save that its fruits are sentient and resemble lambs, hence the name. Instead of wool, these lambs grow cotton. Like other sheep, vegetable lambs are peaceful grazers. The lambs are attached to the parent plant by an umbilical cord that keeps them from straying too far.
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| ©1998 Jonathan Hunt |
It was commonly believed that once the lambs had grazed on all nearby grass, they would starve to death and become ripe for harvesting. However, this is false: when the lamb finds its umbilical restricting its movement, then it will gnaw it in half. The free vegetable lamb will continue to wander and graze. Eventually it will mate (vegetable lambs are both male and female), after which it will die and a new cotton plant will grow from its corpse. Thus the cycle repeats.
In addition to being harvested for their cotton, vegetable lambs are also eaten. Their blood is a sap that tastes like honey, and their flesh tastes like fish. Indeed, one of the strategies employed by the lamb is to be eaten by a predator and allow its seeds to be scattered further than it could by itself, similar to the avocado.
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| ©2006 Kory Francka |
Relevant links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_Lamb_of_Tartary
- http://mistholme.com/dictionary/vegetable-lamb/
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Thompson_Motif-Index_2nd_1.djvu/380
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Motif-Index_of_Folk-Literature/Volume_1/B/0
- http://www.medieval-baltic.us/barometz.pdf
- https://www.wired.com/2014/04/fantastically-wrong-vegetable-lamb-tartary/
- https://esoterx.com/2013/05/04/the-vegetable-lamb-of-tartary-a-netherworld-between-food-groups/
- https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lamb-plant-myth
- http://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2011/06/vegetable-lamb-of-tartary.html
- http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43343
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