Does anyone know the actual rarity of these? I mean, we’ve all found em a few times…but does anyone have a percentage of 4 leaf to 3 leaf? It must be real low…
I bring this up because today I was in the park with my GF, just layin in the sun and whatnot… when I look down to see a four leaf clover! Much to my surprise, about a minute later I found another, less than a foot away from the first too! Is this really rare for two to be that close together?
Btw, whats up with four leaf clovers… are they just a rare genetical mishap, like human deformities?
I’m not sure of the probablities, but I do know that the percentage of them is due in large part to local growing conditions. Four-leaf clovers often grow in response to poor light condtions, so that the less sunlight an area gets, the more four-leaf clovers one can expect to find there.
I once found a clover plant which had four leaves on every stem (it was a real clover, not oxalis or one of the other cloverlike plants - I know the difference) - this would seem to suggest some kind of genetic defect or viral infection (if it were entirely driven by environment, I would not expect every leaf to be affected while adjacent plants were completely unaffected)
Growing up the clover in my back yard had way more then it’s fair share of the four leaf variety. I have several hundred all neatly pressed in a book. I also have special pages for the five and six leaf clovers I occasionally found.
Of course there were more three leaf then four leaf clovers even in my back yard.
You’re not finding a bunch of different four-leaf clover plants close together; what you’re finding is one clover plant with a bunch of stems. Strictly, the little stalks with three “leaves” on the end are each one leaf, and the three “leaves” are leaflets. Next time you find a clover (of either cardinality), carefully dig up the root structure and you’ll find that it’s connected to all of the other clover in the patch, as one plant.
And while we’re on the annectodes, I once found a polyleaf clover plant where the individual leaves had as many as seven leaflets each. No, I’m not making this up. Other than the odd number of leaflets, they looked identical to the other clovers around here, and the plurality of leaves with the usual three leaflets were completely identical to the regular ones.
