III: Clover
Nobody's entirely sure what a shamrock is.
Good morning. Today is tridi, the 3rd of Prairial, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le trèfle, a small green plant that gets lucky sometimes.
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While clover is most popularly thought of as a field of small green leaves, it is a complete plant that grows quite beautiful flowers if left unmown or ungrazed. The best pollinators of clover flowers are wild bumblebees, but those have been in precipitous decline in recent years, so beekeepers are increasingly called upon to set honeybees loose on clover fields to do their best. Clover is an important forage leaf and an even more important crop rotation component, giving dirt a good rest with its shallow roots while also "fixing" nitrogen in the soil to turn it into nutritious compounds for the ensuing crop.
The most famous clover species isn't a species at all, but an abstract symbol. I'm speaking, of course, of the Irish shamrock, which has become synonymous with Ireland and her people. The curious part is how this happened, how recent it was, and how it has less to do with St. Patrick, at least initially, than people might assume.
