Botanica Fabula

Clover and change

Amanda Edmiston

My late mother-in-law loved bees. She taught my daughters not to be scared of the gingery bumblebees or common carder bees hovering around the Red Clover (Trifolium pratense) that flourished in the wilder regions of her garden. She smiled even when a bee landed on her arm, as she showed the children how to suck the nectar from the ‘sooky pom-poms ’ . The older child shied away at first— they’d been terrified by all things flying and stripy since a gang of wasps tried to mug them for a lollipop when they were three or four. But they were slowly won over, as grandma let the bee walk down her arm and stroll across her palm, before it lifted off in search of a richer source of pollen. This is one of both children’s most enduring memories of their grandmother. To this day, whenever a bee comes near the younger child, she likes to tell anyone listening how her grandma let bees walk on her hands, and knew how to get sugar from flowers.

My own favourite childhood memories include warm school lunchtimes spent on the playing fields, searching for magical four-leafed Clovers amongst the purple tufts and attendant Daisies (Bellis perennis) scattered liberally through the grass. I remember the charm-like words we learnt about this widely sought-after quatrefoil: One leaf for love, one leaf for wealth, One leaf brings luck, so please hand it over, The last leaf will bring you good looks and health— All growing from the green, four-leafed Clover. I've heard other versions since— and many reminiscences about plant-lore from around Scotland that suggest all sorts of other magical rhymes and associations —but this is the one I stick to, even though, when I finally found one at the age of seven, I rigidly refused to give one of the leaves to a friend. Instead, I pressed it into my tiny, navy blue, leather-bound Collins English Dictionary. The book had belonged to my mum before me, and I carried it everywhere during my primary school years, intent on consuming a diet of new words. Words and plants were passions of mine by the time I left that class, so maybe my dictionary-stored four-leafed Clover had already begun to work its magic.

Many years later, while packing for a life-changing house move, it fluttered— fragile and tissuelike —from the pages of my dictionary. Its edges were puckered and starting to disintegrate, but I managed to gently catch it as it fell, and placed it back in the pages of the book. After I had driven the rented van into the driveway beside my new home in Glasgow, it was in one of the first boxes I unpacked. My mind kept being drawn back to this leaf, thinking about how it had accompanied me for over twenty years, mostly forgotten, the mere residue of a childhood memory, preserving my luck.

The stress and anxiety involved in the upheaval of the move; the huge transition I'd undertaken to reach Glasgow and start my degree in herbal medicine; the dust from unpacking and then cleaning the small, slightly ramshackle, converted stable that was my new home...All of this played havoc with my skin. Eczema bubbled, then started to peel in scales, lizard-like— but, as my student-clinic supervisor added tincture of Clover to my mix, it started to clear. I felt that I was shedding my skin and starting again.

My four-leafed Clover didn't make another appearance for four years. Perhaps it had been biding its time, holding a space for the next transition. It re-entered my consciousness just when I was starting my journey as a herbal storyteller. I was researching lore around the plants that feature in children’ s games. Daisy chains, and the petal-plucking choruses of ‘loves me, loves me not’, had already woven their way into my thoughts. Now, it was the turn of the lucky Clover rhyme from my childhood. My mind went back to the leaves in my dictionary, and I hastened to check whether the Clover was there. Sure enough, its fragile shape still clung to the page full of words beginning with ‘S’.

During an outdoors storytelling session, I asked if anyone had different rhymes or traditions around lucky Clover. The children scanned the grass, hoping to find one. It was then that I was told by one young mum that, when she was growing up, she was always told that placing your found four-leafed Clover in particular places would bring about different types of luck. If pressed into a Bible, she said, it would protect the finder from evil; if in a wallet, it might bring wealth; in a letter from a lover, then it would bring luck to the relationship.

As I travelled home that day, I pondered. What sort of luck might a four-leafed Clover bring if pressed in the pages of a dictionary, sitting amongst the ‘S’ words? Might it have had a hand in helping to weave, into the very fabric of my world, so many stories?