Red Clover

Trifolium pratense

flower

Red clover (Trifolium pratense) is a short-lived perennial legume with the classic three-part leaves often marked with a pale crescent and rounded, sweet-scented rose-pink flowerheads beloved by bumblebees and honeybees. Long grown as a forage crop and a nitrogen-fixing green manure that enriches the soil, it is also valued in the garden for its edible, mildly sweet flowers, used fresh in salads and dried for a pleasant traditional tea. Easy, cheerful, and hardworking, it improves the ground it grows in, feeds pollinators all summer, and self-sows to persist, making it as useful in the vegetable plot as in the meadow.

✅ Plant alongside

Good neighbors that attract beneficial insects or deter pests

• Corn — A heavy feeder that benefits from the nitrogen red clover fixes when interplanted or grown before it
• Cabbage — A living-mulch undersowing of clover feeds brassicas and shelters the soil
• Grass — Classic in a flowering lawn or pasture mix, the clover feeding both the grass and the bees

🛡️ Pest & disease prevention

Proactive ways to stop trouble before it starts — tap a name with an arrow for its full guide

• Aphids →

  Hose colonies from the growth; the many beneficial insects clover attracts help control them

• Clover weevils →

  Notch the leaf edges but rarely cause real harm - vigorous stands shrug off the damage

🌸 Blooms & cutting

Pick the fresh pink flowerheads in full bloom on a dry morning, when they are sweetest, for use fresh in salads or for drying; snip the whole head, and a patch can be picked repeatedly through the long bloom season. Dry the flowers quickly and thoroughly in a shaded, airy place for tea, as the dense heads hold moisture. The young leaves are also edible cooked.

🥗 Nutrition & benefits

Red clover flowers are edible, mildly sweet, and pretty in salads, and are most often dried for a gentle, pleasant herbal tea with a long folk tradition; the young leaves can be cooked as a green. In the garden its bigger contributions are ecological - it fixes nitrogen to enrich the soil as a cover crop and is one of the best nectar plants for bees.