Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

AN ORCHARD OF ALL SORTS OF FRUIT-BEARING TREES AND SHRUBBS FIT FOR OUR LAND, TOGETHER WITH THE RIGHT ORDERINGE, PLANTING, AND PRESARVING OF THEM, AND THEIR USES AND VERTUES. COLLECTED BY JOHN PARKINSON, APOTHECARY OF LONDON. The picture on the title-page portrays the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve tending the flowers. The outward edge is rimmed with spikes representing the sun's rays. At the top is the eye of Providence, and z2 52 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN on each side a cherub symbolising the winds. In the centre of the garden is the famous Vegetable Lamb, supposed to be half animal and half plant. This curious myth of the Middle Ages lingered on, and was actually discussed as a matter of faith by scientific men towards the end of the eighteenth century. The Borametz, or Scythian Lamb, or Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, as described by travellers, appears in both the frontispieces of Parkinson's books. When studying the flower books at the South Kensington Museum, I felt curious about this tradition, which the Church of the Middle Ages took up, making it a matter of faith that the Vegetable Lamb grew in Paradise and was in some mysterious way typical of the Christian Lamb. My brain was soon cleared by finding at the Museum a book written by Mr. Henry Lee, and published as late as 1887, giving an excellent account of the whole tradition. This book, called ' The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary/ contains several pictures, reproduced from old books, of the lamb. Some represent it growing, as Parkinson has it, on a stem, from which it was supposed to eat the grass as far as it could reach and then die. Another picture is of a tree with large cocoons, which burst open and display a lamb. The belief seems to have been that the lamb was at the same time both a true animal and a living plant. Mr. Lee carefully goes through the whole tradition, quoting all the known sources from which it arose. According to him, about the middle of the seventeenth century very little belief in the story of the Scythian Lamb remained among men of letters, although it continued to be a subject of discussion and research for at least a hundred and fifty years later. He sums up his explanation with the following sentence : — * Tracing the growth and transition of this story of the lamb-plant from a truthful rumour of a curious fact into a detailed history of an absurd fiction, MARCH 53 I have no doubt whatever that it originated in early descriptions of the cotton plant, and the introduction of cotton from India into Western Asia and the adjoining parts of Eastern Europe.' All this seems so simple as explained by Mr. Lee, how the early travellers came back and said, ' In the far East there is a tree on which grows the most beautiful fine wool, and the natives weave their garments of it.' The Western mind could conceive of no wool except that of a lamb ; in this way the fiction grew, and was passed on from one writer to another. In a poem by Erasmus Darwin, published in 1781, of which more hereafter, it is alluded to as a plant that grew on the steppes of the Volga in the following terms : —