Field Notes—

Longing For Life In The Clover

By Curtiss Clark

Like so many other office-dwelling people my age, I have too much lawn and too little time. Fortunately, Dave from down the street can operate every kind of machine, from leaf blowers to industrial cranes, and he stops by our place once a week for about 20 minutes and mows, trims, and blows the grass off the walks. It would take me hours to do a much worse job. Because Dave is Master of the Machines, he makes me Lord of the Lawn for a very fair price.

As Lord of the Lawn, however, there is a great temptation to place myself above it all, barely noticing the living worlds beneath my feet as I tramp out to the gardens or the barns or the compost bin in the course performing other chores for which I am not yet lord but merely a serf with aspirations. But on fine summer days, when the cup of the sky is filled with Rorschach clouds, circling hawks, and darting dragonflies, I lower my exalted self to the lawn to lie on my back to take it all in. From that position, I can hear what Tennyson called “musical hounds of the fairy king” — bees working the white clover.

Every few years, a movement arises to do away with the typical American lawn. Growing lush grass lawns devoid of weeds wastes oceans of fresh water and throws whole ecosystems out of balance through the persistent, some say obsessive, application of fertilizers and broadleaf weed herbicides.

White clover, they say, makes a perfect lawn. With deeper roots, it requires less water and stays green even through the parched weeks of July and August. Because it spreads so thickly, it quickly eliminates competing weeds. Liker other legumes, it fertilizes itself, grabbing nitrogen from the air and fixing it in the soil with the help of bacteria living in the nodes of its roots. Its sweet nectar draws bees and other beneficial insects to the yard as well.

The earliest American lawns were mostly clover. In his 19th Century book on the language of flowers, Flora Symbolica, literary scholar John Ingram noted that farmers in England and North America who spread lime on land they had turned over for the first time were rewarded with a spontaneous profusion of white clover, which enhanced soil fertility and was favored by grazing livestock. Clover came to be associated with the promise of a bounteous future.

Clover belongs to the genus Trifolium (three-leaves) and most of what has been cultivated in America has come to us from Europe. The trefoil cloverleaf is, of course, the shamrock symbol of Ireland, where St Patrick is said to have taught his disciples the mysteries of the Trinity using the three leaves of clover. The shamrock became an emblem of the great promise of the Trinity, and finding a four-leaf clover brought an extra measure of promise, or luck, to the finder. Being “in the clover” has come to mean living a carefree, comfortable, and prosperous life.

 If, after gazing at the sky, you want to roll over on your stomach and gaze at the clover patch, you may come across a four-leaf clover. But if, as always, there is too much clover and too little time, you can, believe it or not, order a four-leaf clover from Clovers Online (www.fourleafclover.com).

During the famines, the Irish weren’t exactly “in the clover,” but their beloved shamrocks were not only good luck, they were nothing short of salvation for some starving families. The dried flowers and seedpods of white clover were ground up into flour for making bread. An infusion made from the dried flowers was also a substitute for tea.

White clover in our lawns is joined each summer by its big brother red clover, which decorates meadows and roadsides with its pretty purple flowers. Here in the New England, red clover used to be the favored fodder crop among dairy farmers before alfalfa took over. Vermont honored it by making red clover its state flower. I honor it with a childhood memory of lying on my back in a field, pulling the florets from red clover blossoms and sucking out their sweetness as dragon clouds chased their tails across the sky.

 As Lord of the Lawn, I have no time for such indolence anymore. I have to pick myself up off the ground and get on with my chores. But one of these days, with luck, I’m going to return for good to life in the clover.