Clover up close

Next to the dandelion, white clover may be the most identifiable lawn flower. Each bloom forms from a busy network of rooted stems that resembles a complex junction of highway interchanges. Grab a handful of these dense root stems and every clover bloom in the immediate vicinity trembles. Pull harder and you start to feel like you are pulling up the carpet of your lawn, but there is no hardwood under this carpet, just soil and deeper root systems. 
Now that you are starting this second paragraph, you are likely ready to be moving on from clover. I mean, what else can be said about this common wildflower except of course that we know it also comes in purple and in some areas, yellow? Surely we have covered clover sufficiently considering very few of us are full time botanists or seed salespeople?
Enter Mary Blocksma: librarian, author and clover-noticer. She wrote a book called Naming Nature in 1992 that I found secondhand more than ten years ago and incorporated right away into our Morning Time read-alouds. Several things that she mentions in her almanac journal have always stuck with me in some form or another. The ones on clover are from her July entries and since it is still July, I thought I would share her insights and some photo examples of what she describes in writing. 

"With beautiful wildflowers blooming faster than I can keep up with them, I thought I wouldn't bother with clover. But even the variety I thought was the most boring, White Clover --the low-growing one with pinkish-white, inch-wide pompoms, so often found in lawns --charmed me when I looked at it closely. Like certain violets, but unlike most clovers, each three-part White Clover leaf grows from the ground on its own stem, as does each bare-stemmed blossom.  The flower head --a compact globe of dainty Sweet Pea-like flowers--begins blooming at the bottom."

Then she zeroes in on the detail that charmed her and gave us this entry in her July notes:

"As each flower is pollinated, it closes up and droops, while the new flowers bloom invitingly above. When I looked at each blossom of White Clover, I could tell just how far the pollination had progressed."

Finally she sums up all the stages of the White Clover as a flower of the field that springs up and then fades away.

"A new flower head was tight and round, blooming only at the bottom; a half-pollinated flower head was skirted, like a ballerina, a dried flower head lacked only a face to resemble the head of  a tiny, brown-haired doll."

Re-examining the clover patch in our backyard, I am delighted to find examples of all the stages she describes, especially the gorgeous ballerina skirt marking the "half-way" point. It is a little thrill to clearly see how each clover flower indicated its status by being upright or drooped. The tiniest pollinators seemed interested in seeing for themselves what flowers still had nectar for them, but the larger bumblebees only seemed to spend time on the flowers still facing up, clambering over each open flower on the single stalk. 
There is a little rebuke in how we so easily assume we know everything there is to know. Surely we have not exhausted our understanding of even the common things that surround us. The reward comes to those who humble themselves and look carefully. 

I'm very glad that Mary Blocksma challenged herself to pay attention to even the White Clover and write about her observations.