Roll me over in the clover

Finding a four-leafed example might be lucky, but, as we toast St Patrick’s Day, Ian Morton investigates why the clover (or shamrock) is so important to the Irish

- Ian Morton

FIRSTLY, we have the Irish question. No, not that one, this one: what is shamrock and what is clover? The sentimental claim of the Emerald Isle to the exclusivity of shamrock was never better expressed than in the 1914 song A Little Bit of Heaven by American songwriter J. Keirn Brennan, which features the lines:

So they sprinkled it with stardust,

Just to make the shamrocks grow,

’Tis the only place you’ll find them,

No matter where you go.

Pure blarney. Shamrock and clover are botanically the same and there are 245 recognised species worldwide. To my mind, if there’s a collective noun for clover, it’s a complexity.

Shamrock derives from seamair, from the old Irish semar—meaning clover—and og, meaning small or young. The first published reference to it in English can be found in John Gerard’s Herball of 1597, which noted that ‘meadow trefoils are called Shamrockes’. Irish botanist Charles Nelson has bluntly summed up the situation thus: ‘Shamrock exists only on St Patrick’s Day. Every other day of the year, it’s known simply as young clover.’

Yet who would wish to deny the Irish their national plant? For legend has it that St Patrick—the 5th-century Romano-British missionary, who weaned the land away from Celtic polytheism—used clover’s three-leaf configuration to illustrate the Christian trinity, of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.