Maiden Clover Seeds (Trifolium microcephalum)

Short and lovely, maiden clover is a friend to bees. It’s also a host plant to seemingly innumerable species of butterflies and moths -- including gray hairstreaks, greenish-blues, Shasta blues, orange and clouded sulphurs, painted tiger moths, and at least 70 or 80 others! Its leaves are also apparently edible for people.

Despite its annual life cycle, maiden clover grows into a lush multi-stemmed and semi-creeping spring wildflower, punctuated with small, pale pom-pom pink flowers. With some favorable precipitation it can form a sort of soft, luxuriant seasonal ground cover, even in coarse, rocky, or polluted and degraded soil conditions. In its natural state, it occurs on hillside meadow seeps, sunny streambanks, rocky outcroppings, and periodically in the open understories of pine forests.

Maiden clover is native from southern Alaska to Baja California, occurring both in wet coastal climates and the dry inland sides of mountain ranges.

This is an easy to grow, carefree plant, requiring only the winter rains to establish, then happy to complete its lifecycle free of irrigation. That said – it also STRONGLY benefits from slug protection during establishment. Like all native clovers rogue slugs can quickly decimate tiny newly germinated clover seedlings. We recommend planting it with a basic, organic-approved iron-pellet slug bait (e.g. Sluggo). To accelerate germination, the seeds also benefit from a day of warm water pre-soaking prior to planting.

Approximately 200-400 seeds (0.6 grams).