I can’t look at red clover without smiling.
Seriously, take another look at it. I’ll bet you’re smiling too.
Clover is a friend to everyone in the country. It used to be planted for use in hay before alfalfa came into favor but still lives on in many pastures and, of course, ditches. When my sister and I were small, my mom showed us how to remove the red-purple flowers and suck the sugary nectar out of them, beating the bees to the punch.
So, since red clover is so darn friendly, I thought photographing it would be a breeze. I was wrong. It turns out that red clover suffers from the curse of curly, twisty, kinky stems, which makes it really difficult to arrange in a vase. The stems tangle up with each other and when you try to adjust one blossom – even a little bit – that movement nudges the neighboring stem, which in turn adjusts the one next to it, and suddenly your whole arrangement has shifted into Frankenstein’s bouquet. And so you grumble and start over, again and again and again.
After the eighth or ninth or hundredth rearrangement, my impatience boiled over and I packed the vase with clover, wedging them all together so they just couldn’t shift and forcing the blooms into an tidy, hierarchical pattern. “So there,” I thought. “Fixed it.”
Except the shots just didn’t feel right. Sure, they were orderly, but anyone who knows clover knows that there’s a lot of charm in its lanky, sprawling growth. Every time I looked back at those shots of my tight, orderly clover arrangement, I liked it even less. So more than a month later I trudged back into a ditch, collected a second bucket of clover and returned to the studio to embrace randomness, tucking the quirky, sparse stems into the vase one at a time and just letting them do what they wanted to do.
It took a long time to coax out the picture I wanted, but the approach I took in that second shoot was the right one. This is the red clover with casual, relaxed, spreading charm. It’s the one that makes me smile.
Red Clover, Trifolium pratense
Shoot date: September 1, 2019
Possible use as a cut flower: Yes indeed! Red clover is happy to spend a day or two on your kitchen windowsill. (You can put it anywhere, of course, but I kept mine on the windowsill so I could smile at it while I washed dishes.)
