White clover is called the honey suckle of the grass, and bee keepers often plant whole fields of it.
Because it has so many flowers on one head, you may think the clover is a cousin of the dandelion. It isn't. The flowers are not crowded into a green vase, they just grow very close together on the swollen end of a stem. Pull the colored tubes from a clover head, and you will see that you have left behind every one some tiny upright threads. Those are the seed-making parts. Put a pink tube under a microscope and see how it widens, at the top, into pouting lips something like a sweet-pea blossom. Clover and Alfalfa are really cousins of the peas and beans and peanuts, and other plants that ripen their seeds in pods. You know the pods of peas and beans that you can split to shell out the seeds? Clover seed, too, grow—one or two, in a fairy pod below the tubular blossom. It is hidden, for the flower tube dries and turns brown on the head. The pod of the peanut is a woody, papery shell that grows on buried stems like potatoes. The seed-pods of alfalfa are coiled in snail-like spirals, and the teeny weeny seeds of green or yellow are exactly the shape of kidney beans.
How much a sweet-pea blossom looks like a butterfly. One of the names of this class of plants is a long Latin word that means butterfly. You can always know them by the blossom, although some of them are low creepers and some are beautiful trees. Do you like liquorice candy? Liquorice is a cousin of the clover and peanut. It is a woody shrub sometimes called the sweet root, for it is from its root that the liquorice juice is made. The sensitive plant, whose leaves go to sleep if you touch it, is one of this family, too; and the indigo shrub that gives us our beautiful blue dye. Another very tall relation is the beautiful honey locust tree, with its clusters of pink butterfly blossoms. It grows in many parts of our country. The clovers are members of a very big, important family, aren't they? They are all great honey makers.
All of these butterfly-blossomed, pod-seeded plants have strong, fibrous roots. There is a central root-stock with many branches, and a bush of rootlets, like a leafless shrub turned upside down and buried. This gives them a strong hold on the soil and many water suckers. Their stems are very zig-zaggy, branching in a twisty kind of way, as if they didn't quite know whether to be vines or not. The white clover, and the dear little Shamrock of Ireland, spring from creeping, vine-like stems. Many peas and beans climb on poles, or
