' 46 CLOVER CULTURE. 



1 



that is, growing two years, or at most short perennials, which 

 they are said to become if prevented from flowering by con- 

 tinued pasturage, and thus last for three or four years. It is 

 probable that there is ground for the statement made by 

 English botanists, and at which we have hinted in a previous 

 chapter, that there are at least two varieties known as the 

 common red clover, one of which is strictly a biennial and 

 the other a short perennial. Another point of difference is 

 that when the creeping vines of white clover are allowed to 

 grow long, they throw out rootlets along the vine which 

 give it an ability to stand prolonged summer drouths better 

 than the red or mammoth varieties with their longer tap 

 roots. 



White clover seeds abundantly, the seeds growing four 

 and sometimes six in a pod. It secretes a great abundance of 

 nectar and being easily fertilized by the common bee, and 

 therefore independent of the bumble bee, it yields a far more 

 certain crop of seed. It is a common saying among farmers 

 that white clover never fails to produce a seed crop. When 

 we come to examine the ash of the plant and compare it with 

 red clover, the white contains nearly twice as much phosphoric 

 acid, nearly four per cent, more lime, and potash in the 

 proportion of two to five. It will therefore flourish on soils 

 that aredeficient in potash, while it requires more phosphoric 

 acid than the red clover. Both, however, by reason of the 

 bacteria in the nodules or tubercles on their roots, obtain their 

 nitrogen to a very large extent from the atmosphere. 



The history of white clover is somewhat obscure. It is 

 probably indigenous to the Eastern states of America, and is 

 said, on what authority we do not know, to have been domes- 

 ticated, by cultivating the seeds of the wild plant, about the 

 beginning of the last century. It is recorded of a farmer in 

 one of the Eastern states at that time that he "sowed the wild 

 white clover which holds the ground and decays not." In 

 Sir John Norden's Surveyor's Dialogue, printed in 1607 and 

 re-printed in 1618, we find the growing of u clouer grasse or 

 the grasse honey suckle (white clover) with other hay seeds" 

 advised. This would indicate that it is probably indigenous 

 to England, and that the attention of the farmers was called 

 to its merits a hundred years earlier in England than in 

 America. It precedes the introduction of red clover from 

 Europe almost fifty years. It is not. so far as we have 

 observed, indigenous, that is a natural product of the soil, to 

 the West. It seems to have come in as did blue grass (poa 



