WHITE CLOVER 261 



is scarcely in evidence; other seasons it overspreads 

 the pastures. 



While it is an excellent pasture plant for stock, 

 they do not relish it so highly as some other pas- 

 ture plants; when forming seed, it is least valuable 

 for horses, owing to the extent to which it salivates 

 them. Its diminutive habit of growth unfits it for 

 making meadows, unless in conjunction with other 

 hay plants. In nutritive properties, it is placed 

 ahead of medium red clover. Some growers have 

 spoken highly of it as a pasture plant for swine. 



Being a legume, it has the power of enriching 

 soils with nitrogen, but probably not to so great 

 an extent as the larger varieties of clover. Its root- 

 lets, however, have a beneficent influence on the 

 texture of soils, because of their number, and be- 

 cause of the power of the stems to produce fresh 

 plants, which occupy the soil when other plants die. 

 The latter furnish a continued source of food to 

 other grasses, which grow along with white clover 

 in permanent pastures. 



Along with blue grass, white clover plants aid 

 in choking out weeds. This result follows largely 

 as the outcome of the close sod formed by the two. 

 But in some soils, plants of large growth and bushes 

 and young trees will not thus be crowded out. 



Distribution. - — White clover is certainly indig- 

 enous to Europe and to the Northern States, and 

 probably Western Asia. It grows in every coun- 

 try in Europe, but with greatest luxuriance in those 

 countries which border on the North Sea, the cli- 

 mates of which are very humid, and more especially 



