The Trefoil Lawn

A year or so ago the wife pointed out some striking yellow flowers in our lawn. Rich color. Nice and low they were too, not like dandelions. She said maybe we could dig them up and put them in a wildflower patch. But then I saw some of them over by the rock wall, where I don't mow. They were a foot tall or more and didn't create the same impression. So I promptly forgot about transplanting them.

I looked em up. They're called bird'sfoot trefoil. Now, if I had any business sense at all, I'd be advertising and selling them as "Micro Trefoil". Kinda like the "Micro Clover" that came up in my Clover post: As long as you keep mowing it, it maintains the "micro" features that you paid an arm and a leg for.

If I had any business sense at all.

 

I don't think anybody ever gets my sense of humor.

 

I want it for my lawn

Around here, in April the low part of the yard is so wet you can't drive the mower there. By May things are better, and drier yet in June. In July and August things are so dry the plants start to die. This year again the lawn all turned brown -- or I should say, all except the weeds.

I'm never going to be a guy who can out-think the weather, remember when last it rained, and know when to water the plants. I only see it after things are dead or dying. Nor do I have time or hose enough to water the lawn. So I started looking at the survivors, the green weeds in the lawn, looking for something that would make a good-looking lawn, stay green despite drought, and stay low and fairly even for a week or more after mowing.

I found something, but it's not the clover. It's the trefoil, birdsfoot trefoil. The one the wife pointed out two years ago.

I'm just calling it "trefoil" by the way.

 

Herodotus, the old Greek, the father of history, wrote about the customs of the Persians, the enemies of Greece. In this part, from perseus.tufts, he writes of the Persian method of sacrifice to the gods:

To pray for blessings for himself alone is not lawful for the sacrificer; rather, he prays that the king and all the Persians be well; for he reckons himself among them. He then cuts the victim limb from limb into portions, and, after boiling the flesh, spreads the softest grass, trefoil usually, and places all of it on this. When he has so arranged it, a Magus comes near and chants over it the song of the birth of the gods, as the Persian tradition relates it; for no sacrifice can be offered without a Magus. Then after a little while the sacrificer carries away the flesh and uses it as he pleases.

Don't let the word "victim" get you thinking this was human sacrifice. It was some animal, probably a sheep that was sacrificed.

What I really want to say about this ancient Persian ritual is that they used "the softest grass, trefoil" when offering their sacrifice to the god. What I really want to say: If trefoil is good enough for the Persian gods, it is good enough for my lawn.

In a different translation, Herodotus says not "the softest grass, trefoil usually," but instead says

the tenderest herbage that he can find, trefoil especially.

"Trefoil usually" seems to leave it up to the sacrificer to decide what soft greenery to use. "Trefoil especially" seems to make trefoil the rule rather than just one of the options. 

Unfortunately, in the time of Herodotus and the ancients, they were not as fastidious about identification of plants as we have been since Linnaeus. It's more like they had a favorite name for plants they liked a lot, and they used that name for all those plants: They were all trefoil. 

And half of those, the most prized half, were the lotus.

The identification of plants

I found this great PDF from Harvard, called "Plants Named “Lotus” in Antiquity". I just call it Huh! Harvard. From the Abstract:

In ancient times, several plants were named “lotus.” They assumed very important roles in the religions and art of many cultures, but historiography and descriptions of the various plants called “lotus” have always been poor. The aim of this work is to define what plant species correspond to the ancient name “lotus.” Through analysis of classical texts and other historiographical sources, three types of “lotus” have been identified: “arboreal lotus,” “herbaceous lotus,” and “aquatic lotus.” From the sources examined, several botanical species have been identified for each “lotus” category.

For my lawn, I wouldn't want tree lotus or aquatic lotus. I'd want herbaceous lotus: something green and soft and nice to walk on. The "Huh! Harvard" paper identifies not one genus of plants, but four, and several species in total, as the plants the ancients described as "herbaceous and fodder lotus". Apparently no one really knows for sure which plants they were talking about.

It gets worse. At perseus.tufts I searched for lotus clover. The relevant results all offer interpretations of the ancient Greek word "λωτός" that apparently means "lotus". In the sumary below, I have shortened the text, and removed links and references. It looks like lotus is lotus. But for herbaceous and fodder lotus, lotus is trefoil is clover. And "clover" is not necessarily the clover we know as clover.

• λωτός. The lotus here is a sort of trefoil or clover, not to be confounded with the lotus of bk. 9. According to Sprengel, Bot. Hist., it is the Lotus corniculatus of Linnaeus.
  From: W. Walter Merry, James Riddell, D. B. Monro, Commentary on the Odyssey (1886)
  
  
• λωτός. name applied to various plants and trees providing fodder or fruit:
  [Under "fodder plants" they list]
  1. clover, trefoil, Trifolium fragiferum
  2. fellbloom, Lotus corniculatus
  3. fenugreek, Trigonella Foenum-graecum
  4. melilot, T. graeca
  4b Italian melilot, Melilotus messanensis
  From: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon
  
  
• λωτός. the lotus, name of several plants.
  I. the Greek lotus, a plant on which horses fed, a kind of clover or trefoil
  II. the Cyrenean lotus, an African shrub, whose fruit was the food of certain tribes on the coast, hence called Lotophagi
  III. the Egyptian lotus, the lily of the Nile
  IV. a North-African tree; from its hard black wood flutes were made
  From: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon
  
  
• λωτός. lotus.
  (1) a species of clover
  (2) the tree and fruit enjoyed by the Lotus-eaters. Said to be a plant with fruit the size of olives, in taste resembling dates, still prized in Tunis and Tripoli under the name of Jujube.
  From: Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary
  

I think the name "lotus" was applied to plants that were the most special in some way: for example, the ones that provided the softest herbage, the most satisfying narcotic, the most perfect flower, the most beautiful flute music.

The terms "trefoil" and "clover" described lesser members of the plant community, except the Greeks apparently thought their trefoil horse fodder was good enough to be called lotus: the best horse fodder ever. And apart from the upgrade to "lotus" for the fodder plant, the terms "trefoil" and "clover" appear to have been used interchangeably -- if they even had the two separate terms in the ancient language.

I'm still using "trefoil" to mean birdsfoot trefoil, or whatever it is I have in my lawn. But I do like that name "fellbloom".

Want to buy some Micro Fellbloom?

 

Why did Linnaeus call it Lotus?

One more item from the "Huh! Harvard" paper. I thought this was odd:

The most typical of autochthonous [native] plants used for fodder is Lotus corniculatus L. (Fabaceae), which has yellow flowers and rich nectar sought by bees. Therefore, the reference to the genus Lotus for herbaceous and foraging lotuses is well justified.

I think they are saying the yellow flowers and rich nectar justify Linnaeus's decision to use Lotus as the genus name for birdsfoot trefoil. I was wondering why he used that name; but their explanation seems a weak one, and odd I think: The paper seems to agree with the old Greeks that birdsfoot trefoil really did make fodder that was lotus-good. That's a strange explanation.

By the way, the "L." following the name Lotus corniculatus is used to indicate that it was Linnaeus himself who came up with that name for the species. News to me.

Here's a different explanation for Linnaeus's choice of the name "Lotus", this from Puzzlements, at In the Garden, jamesfolsom's place:

Linnaeus himself assigned the Latinized word Lotus to members of the bean family.  At the time, that was no surprise; the Greeks had long used the word for a group of small woody plants in the bean family.

I give this explanation more weight than the "flowers and nectar" explanation. But "Huh! Harvard" has a better explanation, too: Their opening sentence stresses the economic value of the various plants called lotus in ancient times.

In ancient times, the name “lotus” was applied to several plants, and each had a relevant economic importance...

"Huh! Harvard" also says the ancient lotus plants "assumed very important roles in the religions and art of many cultures". Sure. But I'd add that lotus became important in art and religion because it was important to people, because it was important economically.

As for myself, the months I spent reading Simkhovitch's "Rome's Fall Reconsidered" and Huntington's "Climatic Change and Agricultural Exhaustion as Elements in the Fall of Rome" made the important even more important to me. Either Simkhovitch's exhausted soil or Huntington's long-term drought caused the decline of Roman agriculture. But Huntington and Simkhovitch agree that the decline of agriculture (and agricultural income) caused the fall of Rome. (Remember, Roman civilization was based on agriculture. Declining agricultural income hurt almost everyone.)

To have an expanding civilization you need an expanding economy, particularly when civilization is organized so as to require expansion (as Carroll Quigley so wisely points out). Keynes, too, knew that civilization rises and falls with the economy. He said economists are "the trustees not of civilization, but of the possibility of civilization." Thus, if economists cannot fix the economy, the civilization cannot survive.

Me, I've said that so often I'm tired of saying it, and now I talk about trefoil.