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Red Clover

(Trifolium pratense)

Pronounced "try-FO-lium"

"tri" means 3 ,so you won't be surprised to hear the compound leaves have 3 leaflets.
When you look for 4-leaf clovers, you are looking for the unusual leaf that, for some reason, grew with 4 leaflets!

This plant is NOT a native. It grows wild everywhere now.
Originally it was from the Mediterranean and Red Sea areas. "It undoubtably fed the flocks of the Israelites when they fled Egypt and found the green pastures of the Promised Land" says my book Green Immigrants. Roman troops took it north into Europe where the ancient Anglo-Saxons called it "cloeferwort". "Wort" is a very old word that means it was a medicine. It was used as a sedative (calms you), a digestive aid, and an an antispasmodic, especially for whooping cough (which was really bad for kids to get).

Clover became very valuable as a crop to feed animals.

It is an excellent plant to let your animals eat. (Do you have a rabbit?)
Red clover was brought from Europe to be a forage crop here before 1750.
It is one of our most common perennial clovers. The more clover colonists planted the more bees they needed to fertilize it. People keep bees to fertilize their crops like clover and apples that need insects to do the job. Recently bees in New England have gotten sick from a parasite. It will take them years to recover in numbers and this worries farmers. Bees are trucked in from down south and other places following the flowering times of different crops. Did you ever read about "bee spills"...where the big bee trucks tip over?!

Planting red clover will improve your soil because the roots have special nodules (lumps) that house nitrogen-fixing bacteria.
That means the roots can grab nitrogen from the air in the soil and make it available to the plant. Nitrogen is one of the 3 very, very important elements plants need to grow! If you then plow under your clover crop the plant will decompose and make that nitrogen available to whatever you plant next.

We sure need all the clover we can get in our garden!

to White Cloverto Rabbit-foot Clover

Study pointers:

• Red Clover has a bigger flower than the White Clover. It needs a bee bigger than the honey bee to be strong enough to get into the flower! Bumble bees are the bees that work the Red Clovers. If you are interested in bees and bee keeping there is a lot of information in the library and on the internet. An "apiary" is place where bees are kept. You would be an apiarist if you kept bees. There are other kinds of bees that are important to farmers. Look up Carpenter Bees. They are helping take the place of Honey Bees in some circumstances.
  
• Clovers are hairy stemmed to prevent ants from easily climbing the stems. Why do you think that is?
  
• "Tri" means 3. Trifolium refers to the 3 leaflets that make up a clover's compound leaf. Can you think of another word that uses some of the "folium" part of the word? Hint: think of the four seasons; think colorful

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