A Garden of Marvels Read online

  A fruit cocktail tree, therefore, is improbable but not magical. The people I asked at the Maryland garden centers who had never heard of such a tree intuited this. The idea intrigued and amused them, but the tree did not seem outside the realm of possibility. It wasn’t as if I had asked them for a tree that produces kittens, bear cubs, or little lambs, a possibility no one would entertain for a second. Today, no matter how slight your formal botanic education is, you have no doubt that plants cannot sprout baby sheep.

  Not so in the early seventeenth century. Educated Europeans believed that out on the central Asian steppe there were plants that grew tiny, perfect, living lambs. This “vegetable-lamb,” also known as a “borametz” or “barometz” (Scythian for sheep), was said to emerge from the top of the plant’s central stalk, to which it was attached by its navel. The lamb’s four cloven hooves hung down, but not far enough to touch the ground. Fortunately for the borametz, its stalk was flexible and its neck was long enough so that it could, by leaning this way and that, nibble the grass in a circle around the base of the stalk. Unfortunately, once it had eaten all the grass within range, the stalk withered and the little lamb expired. Once the lamb died—either from starvation or at the hands of hunters—its soft and surpassingly white fleece could be sheared, and woven into the fine, snowy cloth for which the region was famous.

  The mythical borametz.

  Much detail was reported about the borametz. Sigismund, Baron von Herberstein, the ambassador to Russia under Holy Roman Emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, wrote in 1549 that he heard from unimpeachable sources that the creature “was of so excellent a flavor that it was the favorite food of wolves and other rapacious animals.” Johann Bauhin, a respected Swiss naturalist, wrote in his Historia plantarum universalis (circa 1600) that its blood is “sweet as honey, and its taste is like the flesh of fish.” Others opined that it tasted more like crayfish and that only wolves, not other carnivores, would attack it. Claude Duret, author of the Histoire Admirable des Plantes (1605), classified the borametz as one of several known “plant-animals,” a group that also included sea nettles, sea sponges, and sea lungs. John Parkinson, apothecary to King James I and the greatest English gardener of his era, published a comprehensive treatise on horticulture in 1629. The frontispiece of his book was an engraving of the Garden of Eden, a locale universally accepted as real and perhaps still extant. In Parkinson’s Garden are familiar species like lilies and asters. Others are Old World imports like date palm, cactus, and citrus. At least one, the pineapple, is from the Americas. And there, center-left, is a borametz, its head and legs dangling, atop its stalk.

  To believe in a lamb-producing plant—or barnacles that grow on trees and then hatch geese, asparagus that spring from crushed rams’ horns, or mandrake roots that scream like men when pulled from the earth—seems laughable now. But in the seventeenth century, no one knew what a plant was or was not. An intuitive definition of plants—something along the lines of “living, green, immobile, insensate beings”—was of little help in delimiting the category. It was easy to find ferns and trees with brown or reddish leaves. The dodder, orange and leafless (and which lives as a parasite on other plants), was prescribed by physicians and healers to cure melancholy. Immobility was a slippery concept: Petals open and close, leaves turn toward the sun, and tendrils climb and twist with almost visible speed. Not all plants are insensate: Touch the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) and its pairs of little leaves immediately fold in sequence.

  And what about those odd sea creatures that Duret noted? They seemed to straddle the worlds of plant and animal. Visible in shallow waters, they appear to be rooted to rocks or coral, and many have branchlike or leafy appendages that sway in sea currents just as terrestrial plants’ branches bend in the wind. They are often earthy hues. On the other hand, some might respond to a touch, and others were observed to consume tiny shrimp and even small fish, a decidedly animal-like trait. It was not illogical to conclude that these sea creatures were a combination of plant and animal. A borametz was simply a terrestrial version.

  In fact, it wasn’t clear what the dividing line was between living and non-living entities, much less between a plant and an animal. A depleted mine might yield new ore when reopened years later, which seemed proof that stones could grow. According to Aristotle, the great Thales of Miletus attributed the attractive power of magnets to their souls, and souls, everyone would have agreed, could be found only in living things. Medieval alchemy was predicated on the belief that base metals slowly grow in the earth, maturing by stages from lead to tin to copper to silver until they reach adulthood as gold. This seemed like a reasonable theory: After all, inanimate eggs turn into chicks and inanimate seeds transform into miniature plants. Alchemists designed their elaborate procedures in accord with abstruse theories coded with astrological symbols, but they always used heat in their procedures, burying lead or tin in warm manure, roasting them in ovens, or simmering them in flasks. Heat and growth seemed to go together. Eggs required the warmth of a hen’s body to develop and seeds needed the sun’s warmth to sprout. Likewise, metals sluggish from living in the cold earth had to be warmed to ripen.

  It was easy to see salt and sugar crystals grow, which seemed to some an indication of a type of life. The dendritic formations on stone that look like fossil plants (and are actually crystalline structures) were a source of great confusion: Were they plants growing out of stone or were they plants made of stone? Miners found twisted veins of copper and silver that looked like plant stalks: Did metals grow like plants or were these metallic plants? Certain mosses, it was noted, could go dry for months and even years—long enough that anyone would assume they were dead—but when they were wetted, they became green again. Had they died and been resurrected? Or perhaps they had never lived in the same way that plants and animals live? Farmers observed that plants were changeable entities: Rye seeds planted in a field occasionally emerged as barley or, worse, useless weeds, especially after heavy rains. The boundaries between plant and plant, plant and animal, and even between inanimate and animate were uncertain. Just as it was in a heavenly rainbow where red bleeds into orange and indigo becomes by imperceptible degrees violet, so it was on Earth. A rhubarb was a plant, a sheep was an animal, and a borametz was somewhere along the continuum between the two. Like a fruit cocktail tree in the twenty-first century, the particular characteristics of the borametz were curious, but reports of its existence were unsurprising.*

  In 1698, Sir Hans Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society in London, slew the borametz. The Society had recently received a collection of natural curiosities and medical implements from China. Sloane was particularly fascinated by one object:

  More than a foot long, as big as one’s wrist . . . covered with a down of a dark yellowish snuff color, some of it a quarter inch thick . . . It seemed to be shaped by art to imitate a lamb, the roots or climbing parts being made to resemble the body, and the extant foot-stalks, the legs.

  The object, he concluded in an article published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, was a piece of the root of a tree fern, and was also the source of the story of the borametz.

  Sloane was correct that the lamblike object was formed from the root of a tree fern. He had seen similar ferns in Jamaica during his stay there as personal physician to the governor, the Duke of Albemarle, in 1688. He was wrong, however, about the origin of the borametz myth. The tree fern is tropical, and could not possibly grow on the cool, dry steppe where the vegetable lamb was said to graze. (The fern now immortalizes Sloane’s error: Its botanical name is Dicksonia—for James Dickson, a Scottish botanist—barometz.) The pedigree of the borametz, however, actually lies in ancient Greece, in the writings of Theophrastus, the philosopher who taught at the Lyceum, the school of philosophy and science founded by Aristotle in Athens.

  Theophrastus was born on the island of Lesbos in 371 B.C., but as a young man, he moved to Athens to study, probably with Plato. He met Aristotle, fifteen years h
is elder, who tutored him in philosophy and natural history. Aristotle is said to have given his gifted and persuasive pupil his name: Theo means divine and phrastos means expression. The men became intellectual collaborators at the Lyceum, and Aristotle would appoint his former pupil his successor as the school’s director, as well as the guardian of his children. About 343 B.C., the two scholars undertook a comprehensive assessment of the natural world. Aristotle focused on animals while Theophrastus devoted himself to plants.

  In the two volumes of De Plantis, Theophrastus treats questions of plant disease, medicinal uses of plants, methods of sowing and pruning, and other topics of practical concern to students in an era when wealth was based on farm holdings. As for grafting, a procedure familiar to growers of figs and olives in ancient Greece, he reported that it was best to join “like on like,” and observed that the greater the similarity between two trees’ barks, fruits, habitats, and growth cycles, the more likely the graft would be successful. He essayed an early taxonomy, grouping plants into categories to try to make sense of their diversity. But, most of all, he observed—carefully, minutely, and dispassionately—trying to determine what plants truly are.

  His book starts with this declaration: “We must consider the distinctive characters and the general nature of plants from the point of view of their form and structure, their behavior in the environment, how they reproduce, and the general course of their life.” His topics couldn’t have been more modern; in fact, they correspond to the chapter headings of a botany textbook I have. At a time when plants were of interest only as medicine and food, when pieces of wood that sprouted shoots were portents, and when a laurel tree or a hyacinth might be a winsome girl or handsome young man transformed by a god, Theophrastus’s approach was remarkable.

  He was the first to describe plants analytically, describing and differentiating root, stem, branch, twig, leaf, leaf stem (petiole), bark, wood, pith, sap, and fruit parts, among others. He noted that leaves are attached to stems in distinct patterns, that buds arise in order and in particular places, and that new growth can arise from the top of the plant or from the side. Emerging seedlings have either one primordial leaf or two, algae have no roots, and ferns have no seeds. He described various trees, and could say whether their bark is easy or difficult to strip, if their wood rots quickly or not, and when exactly they fruit and drop their leaves. He measured the depth of roots, the length of branches, and the height of trunks, and noted how wild forms differ from their cultivated counterparts, whether plants flourish in marsh or meadow, and how temperature affects their growth, among dozens of other bits of ecological information. Date palm growers, he reported, sprinkled the “dust” of flowers that grow on male trees over the flowers on the female trees. If no one performed this dusting, fewer dates would develop. Above all, he saw plants as intrinsically interesting.

  North African date palm.

  Theophrastus rejected ideas based on evidence that is “beyond the ken of our senses.” Pieces of wood that sprouted shoots were not signs or “anything unreasonable.” The bay laurel found growing in the crotch of a plane tree was not evidence of a divine transformation: A bird must have dropped a seed in some moldering leaves. His goal was to rely on the “admitted and observable” for understanding. He rejected the theories of Anaxagoras, who believed that air contained seeds that fell to the ground when it rained, and Diogenes, who thought plants were produced when water decomposed and mixed with earth. While he didn’t question that seeds might change species in the ground, what he did affirmatively accept—floods carrying seeds to new areas—was a process he could see.

  Theophrastus wrote about certain small, “wool-bearing” trees that grew in India and Arabia that “bear no fruit, but the pod containing the wool is about the size of a spring apple. . . . When it is ripe, it opens, and the wool is then gathered from it and made into cloth.” The Greek word he used for apple (µãlon, pronounced “mal-on” and the ancestor of our “melon”) had three meanings: apple, fruit in general, and sheep. At some point, “spring apple”—that is, a young and small apple—was understood to mean a “spring sheep,” that is, a lamb. Since Europeans had never seen cotton plants, and their only experience of a fluffy, white substance that could be woven into superfine cloth was lambs’ wool, the vegetable-lamb was born. It is one of history’s ironies that the most science-minded philosopher of the ancient world, a man who treasured accurate observation of the plant kingdom, was responsible for the myth of the borametz.

  If Aristotle had been the one to write the book on plants, he might have started with “First, we must consider the purpose of a plant.” Of barley, he might have written that the Prime Mover created it with the purpose of producing an edible grain, which is why it has a seedhead that ripens and can be easily harvested. (The doctrine that all things are as they are because a divine being made them for an express purpose is known as teleology.) On the occasions when he did write about the vegetal world, he analogized between plant and animal parts: Roots were like mouths, branches like arms and legs, and leaves like hair. He was not alone in thinking plants were a kind of imperfect animal, made of the same elements only with impurities and without animal warmth.

  To Theophrastus, trying to understand plants by comparing them to animals had no value. “It is a waste of time,” he wrote, “to take great pains to make comparisons where that is impossible, and in so doing we lose sight of the proper subject of enquiry.” Yes, if one looked at the overall form and structure (that is, the morphology) of a plant, there are similarities between the two, but look at growth habits and the resemblance ends. He realized that animals and their parts—the head, legs, arms, etc.—grow to a predetermined size and then stop. On the other hand, while the stems and trunk of a plant may cease growing when they reach a particular size, the plant keeps growing. (Plants have what botanists call an indeterminate growth type, meaning that although each one grows according to a genetically determined pattern, new roots and shoots develop as long as the plant is alive.) A plant, he wrote, is unlike an animal and can be pruned, divided in half to become two plants, or propagated from a piece of itself, say a stem or a leaf. We may call plant parts by the names of animal anatomy for convenience, he said, but do not be misled: They are fundamentally different than animals.

  If only De Plantis had survived. But Latin replaced Greek as the lingua franca of literate Europe in the first centuries A.D., and many of the Greek works, written on delicate papyrus, disintegrated. Theophrastus’s De Plantis, like the vast bulk of ancient Greek works, disappeared. Instead, for roughly fifteen hundred years, Europeans turned to two Roman authors on plants: Nicolaus of Damascus, a historian at the court of Herod, and the historian and encyclopedist, Pliny the Elder. If you had set out to hold back the progress of botany, you couldn’t have done better than Nicolaus. Nicolaus pieced together a hodgepodge of misinformation (also called De Plantis) in about 30 B.C. that was misattributed to Aristotle and thereby acquired great authority. Pliny’s work, Natural History, is a more complicated matter.

  Pliny was one of the hardest-working, most compulsive, and most prolific writers in history. Born in A.D. 23, he spent the first part of his career in the Roman army as a staff officer and then commander in Germany. On the German front, he found time at night and during the winter breaks from campaigning to write a history of the Roman-Germanic wars, no small undertaking. In 54, Nero came to power, and the imperial secret police began pursuing the emperor’s many real and imagined enemies. Government officials, and especially military officers, suspected of opposition were murdered in the streets, put on trial, or forced to commit suicide. On his return to Rome, Pliny concluded this was the moment to retire from public life, and devoted himself to writing books on Latin grammar, a subject not even Nero could find offensive.

  After Nero’s death in 68, Pliny, thanks to his early support of the new emperor, Vespasian, and a friendship with his oldest son, was appointed as a procurator in several of the North African and We
stern European provinces. In this second round of public service, disciplined as ever, he wrote a thirty-one-volume history of Rome, and then the thirty-seven volumes of Natural History. For this, his magnum opus and what some call the world’s first encyclopedia, he read two thousand Greek and Roman texts and consulted with untold numbers of farmers, craftsmen, tradespeople, and other authorities he came across in his foreign travels. According to his nephew and biographer, Pliny the Younger, he rarely slept and had a lector who read to him at all hours, including during meals, as well as a secretary who was constantly at his side to take notes. In Rome, porters carried him about in a sedan chair so he could read and write and not waste a minute.

  Pliny was a magpie of a researcher, and Natural History is a catalog of facts about the universe from astronomy to zoology, from winemaking to woodcutting, from magic potions to metallurgy. What constituted a fact—and Pliny claimed his work contained twenty thousand of them—was a matter of opinion. Open his multivolume work to any page and you encounter a heterogeneous accretion of truths and half-truths, observations and hearsay, and myths and mistakes considered at that time to be the realities of the physical world.

  As for plants, you need go no further than his first pages on trees to see how it is with Pliny. In rapid order, he gives the reader a history of tree worship, a discourse on the nature of plane trees, the dimensions of four renowned plane trees, a tale of the obese Caligula holding a banquet for fifteen guests and their servants inside the hollow trunk of a plane tree, and a report that plane trees grow faster when watered with wine. He accurately describes the Indian banyan tree with its aerial roots that grow into new trunks but then adds that its “broad leaves have the shape of an Amazon’s shield and cover the fruit, so hindering its growth.” When it comes to grafting, Pliny records the techniques of his time, techniques not so different from those that Charles and Susan Farmer employ. But he also writes that he has seen a tree “laden with fruit of every kind, nuts on one branch, berries on another, while in other places hung grapes, pears, figs, pomegranates and various sorts of apples.” While there are certainly some surprising affinities in the plant world—tomatoes, for example, can be grafted onto potatoes because both are members of the Solanaceae family—no rootstock is compatible with all these unrelated species. This cocktail tree, he notes, didn’t live long, but he didn’t suspect, as was no doubt the case, that some trickster had cobbled it together with a sharp knife and a cup of resin.