Also called four-leaved grass, lucky clover, quatrefoil clover
A white clover stem that grew four leaflets instead of three, kept as a charm for good luck. In older British and Irish lore it also let the finder see through fairy glamour.
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Take care: Pick only from lawns you know are not sprayed with weedkiller, and wash your hands after. Do not dig up clover from protected meadows or private land without permission.
A dairymaid finishing late milking unknowingly picks up a four-leaved clover with the grass she carries, and for a while she can see the fairies at work around the cow. In this lore the clover is less about money and more about seeing things as they really are.
Uses: four-leaf clover carried unknowingly
Melton listed among common beliefs that a person walking the fields who found four-leaved grass would soon find some good thing. It is the earliest clear English record of the belief and treats the clover as an omen of a coming find rather than a charm you work.
Each leaflet is given a meaning: faith, hope and love for the three ordinary leaves, with the rare fourth for luck. Greeting cards and St Patrick's Day items spread this reading widely, alongside the three-leaf shamrock used to teach the Trinity.
The oldest firm record of the four-leaf clover as lucky is English, not Celtic. In 1620 Sir John Melton's Astrologaster, a satire on astrologers and popular belief, mentions that finding four-leaved grass in the fields foretells finding something good. Popular articles often say Druids or medieval Celts carried four-leaf clovers to see spirits, but no early source supports a Druid link, and those claims should be read as modern guesswork. What is documented is 19th-century British and Irish lore that a clover could break fairy glamour, as in Robert Hunt's Cornish tale of the dairymaid.
The rarity is real but often overstated. The figure of 1 in 10,000 is repeated everywhere, yet a 2017 survey of about 5.7 million clovers across six European countries found roughly one four-leaf clover per 5,076 stems, and noted that they cluster on the same plants. Collectors have taken this far: the American Edward Martin held a record of 111,060 four-leaf clovers, passed in 2023 by Wisconsin collector Gabriella Gerhardt. The clover's link with Ireland comes mostly from the shamrock and St Patrick's Day, not from the four-leaf form itself.
A dried acorn, or an acorn-shaped pull on a window blind, kept to guard a house from lightning and to bring steady luck and long life. It draws on the old tie between the oak and the thunder god.
A used iron horseshoe nailed above a doorway to bring luck into the house and keep the Devil, witches and fairies out.
Make a wish and blow the white seed head of a dandelion; if every seed flies in one breath, the wish is said to come true. The same puffs were once counted to tell the time or ask about love.
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