Red Clover

Overview

Red clover is one of the most important flowering plants in temperate agriculture — a nitrogen fixer, a bee forage plant, a soil improver, a hay crop — and yet it also carries a substantial folk tradition that has nothing to do with agronomy. The four-leaved clover, most commonly found in this species, is the oldest and most persistent good luck charm in the British Isles. It was carried into battle and pressed into love letters. It was placed under pillows to bring prophetic dreams. The three-leaved form was the emblem of Ireland, the shamrock of Saint Patrick's sermon on the Trinity, growing in the mud of a mission that changed the religious history of the world.

Botanical Notes

A perennial, 20–60cm, with trifoliate leaves bearing a characteristic pale V-shaped or crescent mark and small stipules. Flower heads globose, 2–3cm, dense, pink-purple, composed of many small pea-like florets, from May to October. A vigorous nitrogen fixer via root nodules containing *Rhizobium* bacteria; widely cultivated as a green manure and pasture plant. Naturalised throughout Europe and North America. Contains isoflavones (formononetin, biochanin A) that act as phytoestrogens; also coumarins, flavonoids, and volatile oils. The flowers are the part primarily used medicinally and as food.

Lore & History

Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century abbess and natural philosopher, listed red clover among the herbs useful for blood complaints and fevers. The blood-purifying tradition ran through European herbal medicine continuously from the medieval period to the nineteenth century, when it appeared in the compendiums of Eclectic physicians in America who used it for skin conditions and as a general constitutional tonic. The four-leaf clover tradition is so old that its origin cannot be traced: the Druids reportedly valued it as a charm against evil spirits, but that attribution tells us more about eighteenth-century views of the Druids than about the actual Druids. Patrick's use of the shamrock as a teaching tool — three leaves, one stem, one God in three persons — appears in accounts of his mission from the seventh century onward and has been the defining symbol of Irish Christianity and then Irish national identity ever since.

Warnings