The officers always ask the same question. I’ve had police and park rangers approach me with caution as I’m sitting in a ditch along the highway, entranced by a flower so small most people cannot see it, or on a gravel road pullout amid shotgun shells and dog shit, lost inside a sedge. It says “I may look like a hippie, but I’m really a friendly field biologist.” There are daisies on the shirt also. But if you saw me you, a gray-bearded man with long tangled hair, face inches from the ground, staring intensely at apparently nothing, you might think “something is wrong with that guy.” If you had children, you might steer them the other way, just to be safe. I’m sitting cross-legged in the dirt in a closed campground beside a fire pit. Only then did I realize there was much more to clovers than just three leaves, more than what Family and Genus they’re in.

It took me over fifty years to do this, to pull off the petals, discover what it held within. They have only one or two seeds, and these pods remain closed, dropping like coins to the ground with no one noticing. Tiny, roundish, dark and hidden, not resembling a pea pod at all. Peel away the wilted flower and there it is. If it’s in the pea family, then where are the pea pods? You have to search.

It’s strange and beautiful and unique, but at the same time, looks a bit like a pea flower. They’re rooted in our childhood psyche where we eternally search for the rare and lucky four-leaved ones.Īs a botanist, I know clovers are in the genus Trifolium meaning three leaves, and in the Fabaceae family, so they’re related to peas.

Somewhere Upriver by Patrick Loafman