source : the age
It isn’t as if we’re obsessively on the look-out, patrolling lawns with our eyes to the ground, but some of us would very much like to find a four-leaf clover. Not because we believe it would bring us good luck – though listen, we’re open to that possibility – but because a four-leaf clover is a quirk of nature and coming across one would be a stroke of fortune in itself. That a sighting has eluded us makes us feel mildly aggrieved. And in our darkest moments, suspicious: what if the whole thing is a hoax?
“Some people don’t believe four-leaf clovers exist,” says Helen McHugh, assistant director of the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra. She says this with a hint of amusement because McHugh finds four-leaf clovers all the time. More than a thousand of them in the course of her life, she estimates. As a teenager, she found 70 in a single day. And she’s happy to pass on her technique: “I actually really love teaching people how to do it.”
First, the fundamentals. Clovers belong to the genus Trifolium, meaning “three-leaved”. “Typically, each leaf stalk has three little leaflets,” says McHugh, but occasionally a genetic mutation causes the stalk to instead produce four – or even more – leaflets. She recommends focusing the search for these aberrant specimens on patches of Trifolium repens, known as white clover because it has white flowers and – more importantly for our purposes – a white line across each leaf. Viewed from above, the lines on a three-leaf clover form a triangle, McHugh explains. The lines on a four-leaf clover form a square or a diamond.
White clover is common in grassed areas like parks and school ovals. “You stand over a patch and look down,” says McHugh, who found five four-leaf clovers in the patch pictured above. “You’re looking for that square or diamond shape. Let your eyes relax a bit so that you’re scanning rather than looking at individual leaves.” For McHugh, the scanning has become second nature. “Sometimes, I’m walking and I stop, and I don’t know why. And then I see a four-leaf clover. So my brain does it unconsciously.”
These days, she tends to leave the clovers in place, hoping the next person to stroll past will have the delight of discovery. If she does pick one, she presses it between the pages of a book, then slips it into a card and gives it to a friend. “It’s nice that I can give somebody a bit of a thrill,” she says. “That’s the good luck I get from clover.”
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Jane Cadzow is a senior writer with Good Weekend magazine.
