What a happy little flower!
Birdsfoot trefoil is another common plant that most everyone has seen but few have lingered over … including me, before this photo series. After adoring it through the camera lens, I went looking for some information about this little cutie: it turns out, birdsfoot trefoil is considered an invasive species in many parts of North America but is also commonly used as a pasture plant because it doesn’t cause bloat. Its name comes not from its blossoms but from its seed pods – they have five lobes with the three center ones being most prominent (that’s the “trefoil” part), and it looks a little like a bird’s foot. Mystery solved.
Interestingly, this plant grows in a different way than most of the other ones in this series – it spreads out horizontally as a small, viney groundcover rather than growing up on a stalk. That habit made it a different kind of challenge to shoot, since the viney stems were mostly short, twisty and hard to arrange. After selecting blooms from the center of the plant, which seemed to have the straightest stems, and trying a bunch of different arrangements, the birdsfoot trefoil portrait that I chose to develop came from a minimalist approach: just three blooms and one bud in my grandmother’s jelly jar.
Birdsfoot Trefoil, Lotus corniculatus
Shoot date: July 13, 2019
Possible use as a cut flower: Birdsfoot is really cute in a tiny vase or juice glass, and stays cheerful for a few days.
