Today is being celebrated everywhere - somehow St. Patrick's Day is very popular. It isn't actually "somehow" - it is because of the U.S. with its large Irish populations took on parades with gusto. Turning things green encompasses more than beer: the Sydney Opera House took part in displaying green this year.
Its symbol, the Shamrock, is Oxalis regnellii and has the clover-shaped leaves that have come to symbolize the good luck Shamrocks are known for. Even though it is clover that is the three-leaved plant that St. Patrick picked to explain the Holy Trinity.
For four-leaf clovers, their luck has a history. Druids believed that the four leaves represented the four elements of alchemy: earth, fire, water, and air. They used them as charms against bad spirits.
"Four-leaf-clover-collector record holder Edward Martin would also agree on its luck; he’s found 160,000. And anyone who’s knelt in a clover field to beat the 1-in-10,000 odds might also say it’s lucky. But historians, botanists, and Irish purists all agree on this: When you find one, don’t call it a shamrock."
Guinness World Records says that he has a collection of 111,060 as of May 2007 and has been collecting since 1999. What a lot of cataloguing! How do you store them? I went looking and found lots of possibilities.
I don't think he's cast them in resin or on the inside of bottle caps, or made silver key chains out of them.
There is a blurry picture of his catalogue records - it is HERE.
Did you know there are records for the most number of leaves on a clover - 21-leaf clover and 56-leaf clover pictures show up on google images.
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