An illustration of the ‘Barometz’ or ‘Scythian Lamb’ after Claude Duret (1605), from The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant by Henry Lee, published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London, 1887 – ‘the story of a wonderful plant which bore living lambs for its fruit, and grew in Tartary, seems to have been first brought into public notice in England in the reign of Edward III by Sir John Mandeville’. This book and the Garden Museum’s vegetable lamb specimen were both donated by Dr & Mrs Edward Ford.
