this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Wikipedia puts them at 1/29390 and 4 leafs at 1/5000. An extra leaf is the result of a genetic mutation of the plant. I'm assuming here, but I think it's the same mutation that happened twice.
Hopefully someone actual plant knowledge will stop by to enlighten us!
Thanks, I looked it up, and regarding the 4 leaf clover it checks out. I just remember as a child I seemed to find mostly 4 leaf, but it was probably just childish imagination, 1 leaf kind of has 2 parts, so I probably in my childish imagination thought I found 4 leaf clovers all over the place.
The curse of having memories from before I was 4 years old.
The leaves do sometimes split apart in the middle so you have to make sure they're not 2 leaves and 2 halves.
Yes I think one leaf can look like 2, especially as a child as I was at the time.
I've seen cloverpatches in the wild with a variety that produces almost exclusively 4 leaved ones. They look a little different than your average clovers but you might have seen those! Either way childhood memories are fickle.
In my childhood we'd hunt 4 leaf clovers for days, only found a handful of them and never seen one with 5 leafs!
Good point, and I never found a 5 leaf either.