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Examples

  • I had a trifolium plant in my hand last night at the garden centre unsure whether to buy it or not – I convinced myself now that was quite hard! that it looked too much like a clover and put it down again….. but now after seeing its blooms here I think I might just find a spot for it.

    Wildflowers Of May* « Fairegarden 2010

  • White clover, trifolium repens, is a must for anyone wishing to make contact with the fairies.

    Fairies Part One « Fairegarden 2008

  • _Schabecyge_ or _Chapsigre_ cheese (made in the canton of Glarus) and found that the principal ingredient which gives it so strong a perfume is the _trifolium odoratum_, or _meliot odorant_.

    A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium Richard Boyle Bernard

  • Yes, she had been standing in this very spot, the table here upon her left, that chair upon her right, that trifolium in the pattern of the carpet under her feet, when Harry Luttrell had taken her in his arms.

    The Summons 1906

  • I like to watch the Belgian hares eating their trifolium or pea-pods or grass; graceful, gentle things they are, crowding about Mr. Heaven, and standing prettily, not greedily, on their hind legs, to reach for the clover, their delicate nostrils and whiskers all a-quiver with excitement.

    The Diary of a Goose Girl Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin 1889

  • One sometimes sees on a hillside a ploughed field of red earth which at a distance might easily be taken for a field of blossoming trifolium.

    Afoot in England 1881

  • There to this day it lies where it fell -- a mantle of moist vivid green, powdered with silver and gold, embroidered with all floral hues; all reds from the faint blush on the petals of the briar-rose to the deep crimson of the red trifolium; and all yellows, and blues, and purples.

    A Traveller in Little Things 1881

  • Diving hap-hazard into his book, Thorny demanded a "trifolium pratense."

    St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. Scribner's Illustrated Various 1868

  • The useful products of the field are themselves beautiful; the sainfoin, the blue lucerne, the blood-red trifolium, the clear yellow of the mustard, give more definite colours, and all these are the merely useful, and, in that sense, the plainest of growths.

    Field and Hedgerow Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies Richard Jefferies 1867

  • Next the idea occurred to me of buying all the colours used in painting, and tinting as many pieces of paper a separate hue, and so comparing these with petals, and wings, and grass, and trifolium.

    Field and Hedgerow Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies Richard Jefferies 1867

Comments

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  • The genus of the shamrock.

    March 17, 2008

  • and a four leaf clover is a quadfolium?

    September 17, 2009

  • Or a tetrafolium, just to mix language roots.

    September 17, 2009

  • The live "shamrock" plants one can purchase from time to time are the genus Oxalis, of the family Oxalidaceae. One species in the eastern US is colloquially known as sourgrass, because of the concentration of tart oxalic acid in the plant's vegetative parts.

    September 17, 2009

  • @strev it would be a quadrifolium. Except that it's the same genus, of course.

    September 17, 2009

  • Or quatrefoil and trefoil, if you're talking heraldry.

    September 17, 2009

  • thank you

    thank you

    thank you

    thank you

    prolagus

    September 21, 2009

  • A three-vaned conical protrusion arising from the proximal pole of certain genera of fossil megaspores.

    December 13, 2010