It's not the first five-leaf clover I have found in my life, and I hope it will not be my last. In fact, I can recall finding one or two each year we've been on the farm. Like the four-leaf clovers, the five-leaf clovers also like to talk to me as I walk by. There are just fewer of them.
Just as a reminder for what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the odds of a particular stem bearing four leaves is somewhere in the 1 in 5000 to 1 in 10,000 range. In fact, there is a study that is no longer found on the web, that made a claim that the numbers was 1 in 5076.
If you're wondering about the five-leaf clovers, the same study made the claim that the odds were one in 24,000.
Based on my own experience, I might argue that four leaves probably are about 1 in 5000, since a good clover patch can easily have 5000 stems in a fairly small area. Six-leaf clovers seem to be more common than five-leaf clovers, in part because these may well be the result of two three leaves that did not fully divide themselves.
But, the five leaf clover? I think they might be a bit more scarce than the 1 in 24,000 odds suggest they are. What is even more rare is to find a nice, big specimen with leaves that are all roughly the same size (like this one). Usually, you'll find the fifth leaf is a bit smaller or it sticks out at an odd angle. You can even notice that one of the five leaves above is underneath the other four on this one.
This Australian news source actually did a story on a family that found two of them in one year. If you take a look at the example they show, you can see what I mean about the fifth leaf. This young person in Richmond, BC has one that looks a bit more even - though he flattened it out so we won't know for certain. So, when do you suppose some news agency will contact me to talk about MY five leaf clover(s)?
Yeah. I thought so too.
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