Read by Matilda Longbottom

WWhile plants – the common garden variety, the stuff of everybody’s backyards – are universally loved, we’ve also got a soft spot for the outlandish. By which I don’t mean the just slightly outlandish, like purple carrots and white pumpkins, but the all-out weird. Take, for example, the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

The Vegetable Lamb seems to have first been brought to the attention of the public by the (possibly apocryphal) English knight Sir John Mandeville in his 14^th-century Travels, along with such other tourist attractions as Cyclopes, men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders, weeping crocodiles, and self-immolating phoenixes. He got away with this because Tartary – a vague geographical region stretching from the Middle East through China to the Pacific – was far enough away so that no contemporary European had a chance to fact-check.

Vegetable Lamb stories persisted for centuries. Some claimed it was a melon-like fruit that just happened to be shaped like a lamb, but in its most exciting permutation, the plant was said to produce real baa-ing woolly lambs.

One modern-day guess is that Mandeville was actually looking at cotton plants.

Then there’s the barnacle tree, which reportedly flourished in the Orkney Islands and produced fruits from which emerged barnacle geese. This story is often blamed on Gerald of Wales, clerk and chaplain to King Henry II, who in the 12^th century accompanied Henry’s son Prince John – the monarch who later got into so much trouble with Robin Hood – on a trip to Ireland, where he claimed to have seen the sprouting geese with his very own eyes. Everybody believed him, and the story went viral, repeated in countless medieval bestiaries.

Dorothy, star of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, made a third visit to the magical land in Ozma of Oz (1907) in which, instead of a cyclone, she ended up in Oz after a shipwreck. There, luckily, she came upon a marvelous tree that sprouted dinner pails, each of which contained a full meal, including lemonade, lobster salad, bread and butter, custard pie, and strawberries. And in Florence Parry Heide’s Treehorn’s Treasure (1991), the tree in Treehorn’s yard began producing dollar bills, but Treehorn – who eventually spent it all on comics and candy – couldn’t get his perennially oblivious parents to notice.

But just wait. Science can be almost as strange as vegetable lambs, dollar trees, and dinner pails.

For example, given some manipulations by researchers at MIT, spinach can now sniff out bombs. Spearheaded by chemical engineering professor Michael Strano, the new field of plant nanobionics aims eventually to replace electronic devices with plants. Bionic spinach – a high-tech version of plain old garden spinach – has leaves infused with polymer-coated carbon nanotubes. The polymers are capable of picking up specific chemical compounds in soil – such as sarin gas, TNT, or nitroaromatics, the calling cards of landmines and other explosives. The nanotubes then fluoresce and their glowy output can be picked up on camera, then relayed via computer to a smartphone.

The idea is that, planted around chemical, nuclear, or other industrial facilities or near fracking sites, vigilant bionic spinach may be able to monitor leaks, spills, and other forms of oozing contamination. Strano has plans to extend his experiments to arugula and watercress.

The downside is that once your spinach, arugula, or watercress is stuffed full of carbon nanotubes you can’t eat it – but that seems a small price to pay for safety from pollution, poison, or possible terrorist attack.

Then there’s mining – which in the not-so-distant future may be done not with picks, shovels, bulldozers, and blasting, but with plants. With the turn away from fossil fuels and toward more green energy, researchers predict a need for much more metal: nickel for electric-car batteries, rare earth elements (REES) like neodymium and dysprosium, for everything from wind-turbine components to mobile phones. Climate-change-wise, conventional mining will likely make a bad situation worse. But what about metal farming?

Also now called biomining or phytomining, the idea for this may date back to 1948 when botanist Ornella Vergnano discovered that Alyssum bertolonii – a snazzy yellow-flowered relative of cabbage and kale – was able to slurp up 2000 times more nickel from soil than the average plant. Since then hundreds more of these natural botanical metal gulpers – known as hyperaccumulators – have been identified. (Though they’re still rare: of the 350,000 known plant species, just 750 appear to concentrate metals.)

It’s not known just why some plants squirrel away metals. Best guess, according to most scientists, is that it may be a form of defense against pests; perhaps gnawing insects are put off by a mouthful of nickel, arsenic, cadmium, or lead. For whatever reason, though, the fact that they do so may be an added win for us.

Certain seaweeds accumulate REEs at concentrations up to a million times greater than that found in seawater. Experiments are underway to see if such seaweeds – technically known as macroalgae – could be used to extract REEs from Bokan Mountain in southeastern Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, home to one of the richest rare-earth deposits in North America. Bokan Mountain has been a bone of contention between environmentalists and developers for many years. Maybe hyperaccumulating seaweed can satisfy both, simultaneously saving the salmon and the U.S. electronics industry.

Phyllanthus rufuschaneyi, a woody shrub native to Malaysia, sucks up so much nickel that its branches, cut open, ooze sap colored blue-green from nickel ions; and Odontarhena decipiens, a metal-guzzling cabbage relative native to the Balkans, accumulates up to two percent of its dry weight in nickel. It just may be that the batteries so badly needed for a greener future will come from the garden. Albania, Greece, China, Europe, and Malaysia have all invested in nickel-producing metal farms.

Hyperaccumulators may also play a part in decontaminating polluted soil. Agrostis grass, commonly known as bentgrass, is a hyperaccumulator of such undesirables as arsenic and lead. Imagine eliminating brownfields simply by…cutting the grass.

It’s early days yet for all of this, but there’s reason to keep our fingers crossed. Science can do amazing things.

But even science has its limits.

I wouldn’t hold out hope for a vegetable lamb or a dinner-pail tree. ❖