Whoopsy daisy, it’s almost nine p.m. and I haven’t done my weekly Monster Monday. Bad John, bad writer, no keepy schedule no get the scotchy.
Seriously though it’s been an odd week, but I promised myself I’d keep to my deadlines and so I shall. Here is a quicky post on a creature about as different from the leyak of last week as you can get. Something as adorable and absurd as the pengallan was grotesque. Let’s talk about the barometz, also known as vegetable lambs and tartary sheep.
Frankly, I absolutely love these guys. Imagine a plant that looks a bit like a large cabbage, that unfolds until a little lambs head pops up. Rather than being a grotesque mockery, the lamb is cute as a button, bahs at you once or twice, and then blooms like a flower giving wooly birth. After some time you’ve got a young lamb attached to its vegetable roots by a viney umbilical cord, and the wee sheep starts grazing on the grasses around it.
Okay, so maybe it’s just a tiny bit creepy.
I really can’t make up this stuff. In many of the old depictions the lambs slept on the top of the stalks, just like sunflowers, only you know wooly and with hooves dangling. The stalk would bend down when they fed, and it was important not to let them over feed. If they ate all the grass in the area the barometz would starve and the plant would die with it. Cutting the stalk/umbilical cord also killed both plant and sheep. Likewise you had to watch out for wolves and bears, who found sheep that couldn’t run away quite tempting. Or maybe the wolves just wanted to try vegetarianism, tartary lambs count right? Unless you are one of those people who say things like ‘I don’t eat anything with a face.’
The only way to eat the lamb without killing the plant was to wait for it to die of old age and drop off on its own. This happens once a season. So in those accounts the flora sheep must age faster than their pure fauna cousins, but with proper tending I imagine you could make a barometz plant last you years. I’ve never heard of the barometz making seeds, but one must assume there is some form of reproduction. Maybe you need a very specialized gardener to both breed and cross-pollinate, or a very disturbing type of bee.
The barometz was said to be from central Asia, an exotic location for most of medieval Europe. In a way, barometz was linked to cotton. People said that the best cotton came not from regular cotton plants, but from vegetable lambs that were allowed to grow fat for harvest. The wooly fern is also often called after the barometz, as its wooly rhizomes do look like a lamb all curled up and waiting to sprout. However, there are similar stories in the world. The most closely linked would be the water sheep of China, which are very similar to barometz except more gourd-like than cabbage. There are even reports of some Jewish folklore in which a similar creature could be harvested and have their bones used for prophecy.
Now, I don’t usually do plugs for other media, but I’m mildly fascinated that the barometz does show up now and again in popular culture. For an obscure bit of lore, I’ve seen it in videogames and comics and TV shows. I saw it recently on a webcomic called Skin Deep, just in the background of an odd occult shop. It appears in the Fantastical Creatures tarot, an odd collection of old lore. It even showed up in a show called Lost Girl and they used the bones for a full on vision quest, just like the old Jewish legend. I’m amazed how such a silly little creature has, shall we say, taken root in our culture.
Yeah, I couldn’t help myself.
I’m a bahhhhhd boy.
Writing prompts.
Barometz gardening, there has to be some fascinating stories in a profession that combines horticulture and shepherding.
Bonsai barometz, the bite sized treats.
Come up with your own plant/animal hybrids. Squash schnauzers and papaya parakeets all around. Just no sea cucumbers, cause those things are disgusting.
Damascus Fool 