The Invention of Clover and the Creation of English Nature

This essay explores clover as an instance of how seventeenth-century English botany fashioned an episteme of natural nationhood in the same era that England was becoming an empire. As poets and preachers joined naturalists, husbandmen, and colonial projectors to define a collective English nature through the wild plants found in the nation’s heaths and meadows, this unassuming groundcover came to embody an innate, common, and portable national character. As authors of all stripes sorted what (and who) belonged on English soil from what should be eradicated, they classified clover as a national treasure and declared it critical to England’s flourishing both at home and abroad. Their texts proliferated through the public sphere of cheap print to shape the popular imagination in an era when England was flooded by strangers and strange objects, while English ships sailed across the Atlantic carrying grass seeds to transform the nature of America.