This doesn’t really seem possible, but Edward Martin has found 160,000 four-leaf clovers. I’ve been looking my whole life and never found one.
Trying to find one was my main reason for playing Pee Wee Baseball, but then I got moved from outfield to shortstop and my baseball career ended shortly thereafter.
How fast does Martin find them? He is 76 years old. Let’s say he has spent an average of two hours a day looking for the last sixty years. That would be about 44,000 hours. Could he really find one every fifteen minutes? That seems unbelievable, but maybe some blog-reading four-leaf clover hunters can weigh in on that issue. Possibly he spent a lot more hours per day hunting.
The best part of the Chicago Tribune article is that his closest competitor got locked up in a prison that didn’t have any clover, allowing Martin to surge past him for the record.
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Oddly enough this is not to odd to me. My great grandmother had thousands upon thousands of 4, 5, and even 7 leaf clovers. However she never went hunting for them. They seemed to simply just be there when she looked down. My dad tells me stories of how she would randomly be walking, bend down to do something and there, randomly would be in the ground a four (or more) leaf clover.
They have been passed through the family and are sealed in plastic and bound in a book (some framed in glass). Most of them are labeled with a date and location they were picked. On some days she seems to have found upwards of 50 or more in the same basic areas; all without ‘hunting’ for them. So it is definitely possible to collect 160,000 Four-Leaf Clovers.
My great aunt had this same thing. Her record was 9 in 15 minutes (she was taking a walk with us through the clover fields).
I have this “gene” too, although I never beat this feat lol. Once I found 9 in one outing (but one was a 5-leaf clover…so it didn’t count). Yesterday I found 6 while out jogging.
I’m not kidding, they’re bound in my physics books in my bedroom right now.
As a kid growing up in Nebraska, I used to find them frequently (maybe every other week?) I was always poking at the ground — digging or playing with bugs, that kind of thing. I went on to study and later practice archaeology, in which field I again often found them, sometimes daily. The best was to find a four-leaf clover while surveying — i.e. walking in a very straight line with eyes turned down for potsherds or other artifacts. This was a great trick that often amazed laypeople: I’m just walking along, looking down, and Hey! Four leaf clover!
They always seemed to be the kind of thing that turned up if you were looking intently at the ground, but not looking FOR them as such.
Since moving to the west coast and taking my job indoors (computer stuff) I haven’t seen one since.
My wife is skilled at finding four-leaf clovers but I’m not. Then she told me how she does it and I found two within five minutes.
I’m a detail-oriented person and I look from stem to stem to find a four-leaf clover. However, the approach my wife takes is to scan quickly across a patch of clover and briefly fix her eyes only on things that subconsciously strike her as unusual. Fairly often she finds a four-leaf clover this way.
I still have trouble doing it, but usually because I am reverting to my old approach and looking too carefully to find one.
Her approach reminds me of speed reading in a way. My approach is the equivalent of vocalizing each word in my mind as you read, while her approach is closer to scanning the words without pauses or vocalization.
I have seen two fields (one was the edge of a museum parking lot, the other the margin of a school soccer field) where, for about fifty square yards each, about one in five clovers had four leaves. I’ve made separate visits to those places spaced about a year apart and found the same increased frequency of four-leafed clovers.
Whenever I find a four leaf clover, it’s never alone. And they’re relatively easy for me to find.
Pattern recognition is pretty much what it’s about. I couldn’t explain it any deeper than that.
I press them into books.
Steve, the best place in my experience to find them is to look down near roads. I assume that’s related to the mutation, but I’ve never checked into it. There’s a spot near MIT where the running path crosses Memorial Drive that every year is full of them. I used to bring home 10 or 20 at a time wrapped in plastic.
Are they sterile? If not, then you’d expect clusters.
I also live near Atlanta, GA, and when I went looking for them as a kid they were all over the place and very easy to find. Maybe different strains of clover have different rates of five-leafedness, or some environmental factor might increase the incidence?
I spent a lot of time in Guatemala as a kid. There, the plants that look like clovers (I never checked with a botanist, but we always called them clovers) come just as often in 4 leaves as 3 leaves. There’s no finding involved, there would be hundreds of 4 leaf clovers in any yard.