Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with an outdoor adventure
March 2, 2021
In normal times, Washington, D.C., throws a giant Shamrock Festival, and Savannah boasts one of the country’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parades, but Birmingham is home to a renowned expert on finding four-leaf clovers.
Frankie Osborn, an Alabama Realtor, maintains a sixty-five-thousand-strong collection of pressed clovers four-leaved and up, including two prized nine-leafers. (As the Irish lore goes, the first three leaves stand for faith, hope, and love; the fourth harbors the luck.)
photo: Courtesy of FRankie Osborn
Frankie Osborn.
Springtime’s warm, wet weather and swaths of farmland and state parks make Alabama ideal for clover growth, Osborn says, but the lucky legume (yep, clover is in the same family as beans and peas) is ripe for the plucking all over the South. Osborn’s hunting started as a way to get outside with her kids decades ago “They grew out of it. I didn’t” and turned into a