One day in 2014 in Rochester , New York , a womanhood name Sandra rode her bike into town to do some shopping . She mesh up her steed , shopped and came back to observe it gone . lay waste to , she reported the loss to the cops , who warned her the chance of recovery were svelte .
Later that twenty-four hours , at a umber shop , she spotted another policeman and decided to severalise her sad tale again . Promising to have a look , the pig hopped on his wheel and go off on patrol , but not before Sandra had given him afour - leaf cloverto boost his chances . Within minutes , the officeholder had institute her wheels . Never , he report , had he recovered a lose item so quickly . The lilliputian clover had apparently done its work [ source : Miltner ] .
well-nigh as interesting as the well-chosen effect of this write up is the fact that Sandra had a surplus four - leaf clover on hand . It was no accident — she collect them . In fact , she had so many she made a habit of giving them aside .
In this , she ’s not as strange as you might believe : The Guinness World Record for the largest collection of four - foliage clovers goes to one Edward Martin of Cooper Landing , Alaska , who has conglomerate more than 100,000 of them [ source : Guinness World Records ] . That ’s in truth astounding when you consider that your chances of finding a four - folio clover are one in 10,000 [ source : Olsen ] !
Everybody knows that four - leafage clovers are hypothesise to bring in good luck , and clearly some people really want to pile it on — but just what is it that make them so lucky ?
In the Clover
As is often the case , it all goes back to Eve . Legend has it that as she and Adam were being hustled out of the Garden of Eden , she overcharge a four - leaf clover to sway with her as a souvenir of Paradise [ source : Elmerhebe ] .
Thedruidsof the ancient Gaelic man would n’t have known Eve from Adam , as it were , but they too were bragging fans of four - leaf clovers and carried them around to ward off evil spirits [ beginning : Ventura ] . This practice develop into a medieval possibility that a four - leaf clover would give you the ability to tell apart poof and take evasive legal action if necessary .
As a outcome , back in the Middle Ages , kids entertained themselves by ferret out out the necessary stems and head out for a fairy - hunt . plainly , that ’s a television game just expect to befall [ root : Evans - Wentz ] .
St. Patrick’s Teaching Tool
With the piffling fleeceable clover plants enjoying such popularity , it ’s no wonderSt . Patrickdecided to use them as a teaching tool when he set about convert Ireland to Christianity .
The four - leaf motley being in unforesightful provision , he settled on the omnipresent three - foliage clover to explain the three - in - one nature of the Holy Trinity to the gentile . One leaf brook for the Father , one for the Son and the third for the Holy Spirit , all united on the single stem of the Godhead . Centuries later , the clover has become closely associated with the holiday ofSt . Patrick ’s Day .
likewise , a poem in the popular tradition hold in that the four leave of absence on the favorable clover signify fame , riches , health and close love . Along these melodic phrase , the English have a custom that if you daydream of clover , you ’re guaranteed a felicitous and favorable marriage [ source : Faust ] .
West of England , in Cornwall , some people aver that if pixies stole your child and left a cretin in its stead , the only way to get your own issue back was to lay a four - foliage clover on the impostor [ source : Evans - Wentz ] .
How to Find a Four-Leaf Clover
You screw that articulate about not see the forest for the trees ? The same rule applies here . The expert say do n’t pine away your time pawing through glob of trefoil . Your just bet is to visually stake out an arena the size of it of a distinctive power desk ( about a straight metre or yard ) and apace scan it .
If anything out of the ordinary snags your attention , look at that position more tight to see what it was . If not , move on to your next square and read again . Remember , your chances are one in 10,000 , so you ’ve got to be efficient about this [ reference : Olsen ] .
Grow Your Own Luck
Clover is a case of pea and is prize by farmers for a few reasons : cow like to fill their faces with it;beeslike to satisfy up on its ambrosia and the plant itself likes to fill up its boots with atomic number 7 .
That ’s to say , clover is very good at pulling N from the breeze and rooting it in the ground for other works to run through . There are 300 specie of trefoil , but the best one for ground is known as white clover , orTrifolium repens[source : Faust ] .
Trifolium repens also happens to be the kind of clover plant that produces the golden four - leaf aberration . That fourth leaf , it turn out , is the issue of a suppressedgenethat fails to be suppress . Nobody ’s exactly sure what causes this to happen ; but , for whatever intellect , it rarely does . Very rarely [ source : Olsen ] .
Feeling Lucky
As mention earlier , your chances of finding a four - leaf clover are a measly one in 10,000 . It ’s that rarity that accounts for the luck associated with four - leafage trefoil . In other words , you ’re lucky just to find one , so it stands to reason ( a sure kind of reason ) that more hazard will observe . This is what scholars like to call " magical thinking . "
Because of the way our mentality operate , we ’re perpetually looking for connections to explain the happenstance of the cosmos around us . Magical thinking kicks in when we refuse to retool our conclusions despite all evidence to the contrary [ rootage : Diaconis ] .
Take the account of Sandra and her steal cycle . Both she and the officer who found it ascribe the happy outcome to the four - leaf trefoil she gave him from her collection . But a skeptic might ask how someone toting a quiver of the lucky clovers would have the misfortune of being overcharge of her bike in the first home .
wizardly thinking skirts around awkward head like this and sticks to the convenient details while ignoring the inconvenient single . That say , in this typesetter’s case at least , wizard thought process is a mint more playfulness than scepticism .
In that flavor , here ’s a minute of trefoil trivia : In 2009 , after learn slipway to crossbreed the lucky plant , a farmer in Japan named Shigeo Obara grow a clover with 56 folio on it ! Logically , that make it 14 times luckier than a bare four - leaf clover [ source : Japan Times ] .
This article was updated in conjunction with AI technology , then fact - checked and edited by a HowStuffWorks editor in chief .
