Finding a four-leaf clover, luck and legends

It's rare and it's said to hold hope, faith, love and luck. Small wonder that the author is thrilled to have spotted one in her city!

I felt quite thrilled as I found these leaves of Four-leaf Clover, and clicked them on February 5, 2018. Why the thrill?

Here is the entry about Four-leaf Clover. Amongst other things, it says:

The four-leaf clover is a rare variation of the common three-leaf clover. According to tradition, such clovers bring good luck,though it is not clear when or how that tradition got started.

The first reference to luck might be from an 11-year-old girl, who wrote in an 1877 letter to St. Nicholas Magazine, “Did the fairies ever whisper in your ear, that a four-leaf clover brought good luck to the finder?”

It is claimed that there are approximately 10,000 three-leaf clovers for every four-leaf clover, in the wild, However, an actual survey of over 5 million clovers found the real frequency to be closer to 1 in 5000.

Other plants may be mistaken for, or misleadingly sold as, “four-leaf clovers”; for example, Oxalis tetraphylla is a species of wood sorrel with leaves resembling a four-leaf clover.

Some folk traditions assign a different attribute to each leaf of a clover. The first leaf represents hope, the second stands for faith, the third is for love and the fourth leaf brings luck to the finder.

What I photographed might even be the wood sorrel. But since no one seems to be able to tell the difference…I am considering myself lucky!

Comments:

  1. Ramaswamy G S says:

    Yes. You are surely lucky, being able to run lots of programs in parallel. Whereas able, capable ones are just seeing ur pix and commenting and cribbing that they could not go.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Similar Story

Beyond the parks and gardens, Bengaluru’s ‘wasteland’ ecosystems call for protection

Open Natural Ecosystems in Bengaluru harbour rich biodiversity. Take a look at what they hold and what we risk losing to unchecked development.

When we discuss urban nature, we often forget about real natural habitats. In Bengaluru, widely called the Garden City, most talks about urban nature focus on landscaped parks, roadside trees, and manicured gardens; in other words, artificial ecosystems designed for looks and human comfort. As lay citizens, we usually notice only such nature as we see around our homes, workplaces or other areas we generally pass by. While these places do have some ecological value, they mostly support a few highly adaptable species. This has strong negative implications for native flora and fauna that depend on open scrublands, grasslands, rocky…

Similar Story

The wild in the city: What citizen scientists tell us about Bengaluru’s biodiversity

Spatial and temporal biodiversity patterns, as observed by citizen scientists in the city during 2016-2025, were studied at a datajam in December 2025.

Imagine you’re out on a morning walk, phone in hand, when you spot a butterfly you’ve never seen before. You snap a photo, log it into a citizen science app, and voila! You’ve just contributed to crucial biodiversity monitoring. This isn’t just a hobby; it’s part of a global movement where ordinary people collect, record, and sometimes analyse data about plants, animals, and ecosystems. Citizen science stretches the reach of ecological research. Every observation adds to unique longitudinal datasets that reveal phenology — periodic events in the life cycle of a species — along with species distribution shifts and population…