CLOVER CULTURE. 11 



their varieties seem to be adapted to almost every soil where 

 the plow can provide the means of human existence. Were 

 nature as thoughtless as man, some portions of the earth 

 would become a desert waste. She is ever aiming to build 

 up and restore, and much of the skill and success in agricul- 

 ture depends upon noting carefully her processes and working 

 with her instead of at cross purposes. 



As an example of this we might note the fact that the, 

 Japanese clover, (lespedeza striatd) sown by no human hand, 

 spreads over the abandoned fields of the South and restores the 

 wastes of the cotton planter, the robber of the Southern soils. 

 The Bur clover, (medtcago deuticulata) and half a dozen varie- 

 ties of trifolia ,sown by the hand of Nature herself, gives rich- 

 ness to the pastures of California with its rainless summers; the 

 alfalfa, (medicago saliva) makes the desert bloom like the gar- 

 den of the Lord wherever the hand of man furnishes the life- 

 giving water; the white clover, (trifolium repens) follows 

 hard after the soil robber of the prairies and kindly binds up 

 the broken-hearted land; the alsike camps in the sloughs and 

 swales and along the bottoms, providing pasture for the bees 

 while reclaiming the marshes; the white sweet 'clover, (mel- 

 ilotus alba), and the Bokhara, a closely related variety, take 

 possession of the highways; the crimson clover, (trifolium in- 

 carnatum), nourishes all along the line between the cotton 

 lands of the South and the distinctively corn lands of the North, 

 while the medium red and the mammoth (trifolium pratense) 

 pre-empt the carboniferous and calcareous soils wherever there 

 is twenty inches of rainfall, mainly in the growing season. 

 None of these ever take a foot-hold in the soil without en- 

 riching it and none ever fellowship with other grasses with- 

 out increasing their luxuriance. 



As this work is intended to be practical rather than scien- 

 tific, for the guide of the farmer and not the instruction of the 

 scientist, dealing in scientific facts and conclusions only in so 

 far as it is necessary for the farmer to understand them in or- 

 der to deal intelligently with clovers, we discuss the distribu- 

 tion of the clovers only in so far as it interests the American 

 farmer. The mammoth and common red have a very wide 

 distribution, and we group these together because they are 

 not different species, as many suppose, but merely an early 

 and late variety of the same species. This distinction is im- 

 portant, and because of the failure to note it carefully, many 

 farmers have been led into serious error in their methods of 

 handling mammoth, otherwise known as "pea- vine" or "sap- 



