We decided a couple of years ago to cultivate a clover yard, as we were already well on the way there with a few patches of the deep green stuff elbowing the grass out of the way. One patch in particular really captured our fancy because, besides being viridescent and healthy and plush underfoot, it produces an unbelievable number of four-leaf clovers (and many five- and six-leafers too!). All one has to do is stand in it and look down, and in only a few seconds the eyes will fall on at least one of these lucky little plants. I say “lucky” because I imagine that a clover with more than three leaves, by virtue of the extra surface area favoring photosynthesis, has an evolutionary leg up on its lesser-leafed brethren. These clovers are also remarkable because they’re botanical behemoths; I’m not exaggerating when I say some are broader than my palm from leaf tip to leaf tip. Every year, this crop of uncommon clover yields more four-plus-leaf clovers in a month than I ever imagined a person being able to find in his or her lifetime. It felt like a crime to consider mowing it, so we left it to flower and bid it be fruitful and multiply.

Slowly the patches are growing larger and closer to each other, kind of like a reverse Pangaea situation, each continent of clover enlarging its hegemony over the yard until some point a few years in the future when they will converge, having ousted the graminaceous government of grass completely. We’ve let the dandelions stay, too, and a few swaths of purple dead nettle and hairy bittercress punctuate the parcel. Not only is this a happily organic feast for the eyes, but it’s also a ready (and free!) source of nourishment for our guinea pigs (yes, there is a second one of those now that the preschool petsitting job turned into a foster care and then adoption scenario) and Cecil, our houserabbit. We love the wild carpet out back, and so do a few other precious animals, particularly the bees and my mother. She described our yard as “lush, verdant, interesting, countable, soft green”, which I think is just about perfect.

Ever the speculative opportunist, I wondered if there were some way to capitalize monetarily on the multiplicity of many-leaved clover our yard produces, so naturally I typed the inquiry into Google, hoping against all odds that there was a seller’s market for them somehow. I wrote in the search bar: “can I make money with four leaf clovers”, and the internet immediately responded to my question in that way it has of providing the answer to a different question as a way of telling you that your question has no easily accessible precedent to provide a basis for an actual answer. That’s right: what came up were several different tutorials for making a clover out of money, which is basically the converse of what I wanted to know. As for my original inquiry, please let me know if you have any ideas because it sure would be great to turn this molehill of greenscape into a mountain of greenbacks.

P.S. For you origami enthusiasts out there, here’s what I got from the worldwide web and its sardonic sense of humor: