What is a Goose Tree?

The Goose Tree, or Barnacle Tree as it was also called, was believed to be a tree that grows near water and upon which barnacles grow. When the barnacles are ripe they open to reveal a goose in each. As the goose becomes mature it hangs from its beak and eventually drops down into the water.

Why Goose Tree?

Observation plus imagination does not always lead to a verifiable hypothesis, but it may produce wondrous things such as the Goose Tree. We believe our observation of your needs, together with your content, our combined imaginations, and our web design skills, will produce wondrous web sites.

Quotes from the Middle Ages

Giraldus Cambrensis ('Gerald of Wales', 1146 – 1223), writer and cleric, is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of medieval Wales. This is what he wrote:

"They are like marsh-geese, but smaller. They are produced from fir timber tossed about at sea, and are at first like geese upon it. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks... in the course of time... they either fall into the water, or seek their liberty in the air by flight... I have seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute bodies of these birds hanging from one piece of timber on the shore, enclosed in shells and already formed... Hence the bishops and clergy in some parts of Ireland are in the habit of partaking of these birds, on fast days, without scruple."

Sir John Mandeville was the 14th-century English author of "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville". He wrote:

"In my countrey are trees that beare fruit, that become byrds flying, and they are good to eate, and that that falleth on the water, liveth, and that that falleth on the earth, dyeth."

Sebastian Münster (1489 – 1552) was a universally educated person, a historian, mathematician, geographer, and linguist. He first taught Hebrew at the University of Heidelberg before he settled in Basel, Switzerland in 1529. Münster's Cosmographia Universalis, published first in Basel in 1544, showed the world in maps, but also showed views of cities and places and offered an encyclopaedia of knowledge about the world as it was or as it was expected to be. This was his observation:

"We find trees in Scotland which produce a fruit enveloped in leaves, and when it drops into the water at a suitable time, it takes life and is turned into a live bird, which they call the tree bird."

The Goose Tree was also described by John Gerarde in his 1597 publication The Herball, as Britannica Conche anatiferae, or "British shell little-duck", if you translate literally from the Latin.

Several other authors of the time made mention of this phenomenon.