Consider-the-Lilies Web Gallery
Red Clover
This is a most useful clover that has been extensively grown for pasturage, hay and green manure, and is considered excellent forage for livestock and poultry.
It may escape the pasture and appear in your lawn. Before eliminating it, why not take a closer look?
Botanists tell us that it thrives from "Europe, the Mediterranean region, Balkans, Asia Minor, Iran, India, Himalayas, [and to] Russia from Arctic south to east Siberia, Caucasus, and the Far East. It spread to England [around] 1650 and was carried to America by British colonists."
This is another plant that was named by Linnaeus back in 1753: Trifolium for "three-leaved"—thus the name for the "lucky" exception, the four-leaved clover!—and pratense for "found in meadows."
In addition to its usefulness to agriculture, this plant is used in herbal medicine for a broad range of ailments: It is alleged that parts of it can be used to treat "athlete's foot, bronchitis, burns, cancer, constipation, ...,and ulcers." Sounds like a "cure-all," doesn't it?
I'm recommending it as a flower, of course.
It was this clover that was the first of the "lilies" that I found in the fields around my home and which led to the adventure I've been on these past five years.
As we take a closer look at the bouquet of miniature "orchids" that make up every clover blossom, I am reminded that this one blossom was one of a host numbering literally in the thousands in the meadow that day.
But soon all of were brown and spent after a few days in the August sun.
As Jesus said: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
Go to the Main Directory to consider more lilies of the field.