The fabric of our lives

They say that money doesn’t grow on trees, but technically it does grow on a plant. Our greenbacks, you see, are 75 percent cotton. If you haven’t actually seen a cotton plant before, here’s how it works. It’s a remarkable little shrub, with a bundle of leaves at its base and a long stem shooting skyward. And at the top of this stem is a lamb, which swings around hopelessly like a furry tetherball.

Or so goes the story of the bizarre Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. Also known as the barometz, derived from the Tartar word for lamb, this was a useful little creature that Europeans in the Middle Ages -- aware that cotton was a thing that arrived from India, yet unaware exactly how it grew -- decided was the source of their newfangled threads.

According to 19th-century naturalist Henry Lee, who penned an exhaustive 60-page treatise on the history of the vegetable lamb, in Europe this legend “met with almost universal credence from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.” Its source, it seems, was the Middle Ages’ most famous traveler, Sir John Mandeville, whose fantastical accounts of his roamings abroad in the 1300s led to no small number of misconceptions back in England.