The field blooming with multi-colored paints looks luxurious: a continuous carpet of greenery and a wide variety of colors, slightly swaying from the slightest breeze. And what aromas!
Among such an abundance, one surprisingly gentle and modest wildflower - clover can be distinguished. People call these flowers - porridge.
general information
A characteristic feature of this, as it turned out, magnificent plant is that pollinating insects, the only ones being bumblebees.
Almost all species of this plant are pubescent meadow, quite resistant to trampling, pleasing to the eye with their flowering from the very beginning of summer to autumn.
Porridge flowers are pretty, and therefore often used to create perennial lawns and lawns. About these useful and beautiful plants, the story will be here.
And to imagine how they look, you just need to remember the popular name. This is the same porridge plant that many tasted in childhood, tearing individual flowers from a spherical inflorescence. Thanks to the nectar hidden inside the legs of the petal, they have a pleasant sweet taste.
Many people know the porridge flower. He has more than one name: woodpecker, redhead, woodpecker, red carpet, honey cake, fever grass, honey color, meadow trefoil, bee porridge, cuckoo bread, bee bread and many others - all these are folk options.
Of course, many plants are popularly called gruel, especially during their flowering. But here we are talking about clover.
Description
Kashka (a flower, the photo of which is presented in the article) is a genus of a plant from the Legume family. In total, it has approximately 250 species. These herbaceous plants can be either single or perennial. Their rhizomes become stiff with age, and the flowers are collected in a small round head. Each ripened small bean contains only two seeds.
There is another important feature of clover. At the roots of this plant, small tubers develop, which arise due to a special bacterium (Bacillus radicicola). In this regard, the absorption of free nitrogen by the soil from the atmosphere occurs. Therefore, clover belongs to plants that contribute to a good enrichment of the soil with necessary and important fertilizer.
Porridge flowers in nature are white, red, pink and other colors.
Bob is the clover fruit that is typical of the entire family. It consists of two flaps with the seeds contained within them. Thanks to them, porridge is well propagated. With their help, you can breed this plant in household plots and in gardens.
More about varieties
For growing in gardens, there are different types of clover:
- Mountain has flowers similar to the flowers of creeping clover. But this is not creeping, but an erect tall plant.
- Meadow clover blooms with red flowers, but with leaves with a whitish corner in the form of the letter "l".
- The average clover is very similar to meadow, but its leaves are more elongated and without special signs in the form of a letter, as in the aforementioned species.
- The hybrid has the original color of the flowers: at the base they are whitish, and on top pink or red.
There are many other species in Europe: creeping white clover , Swedish, pink, red (or bloody), yellow and others. Below we describe in more detail some of the most famous and common.
White porridge
The most common flower is creeping clover (with creeping shoots). This is a perennial herb with regular leaves consisting of 3 leaves.
The flowers of this porridge are white, enclosed in a five-toothed tubular cup, have a light pinkish tint. The two lower petals, fused to the sides, form something similar to a boat, and the other two are located on the sides like oars, and the third hangs like a sail. It is this flower structure that is characteristic of many species from the legume family.
Flowers of this species are collected in inflorescences of several pieces on the shoot, and therefore the lawn with blooming white clover looks surprisingly beautiful. In addition to all of the above, this porridge is also famous for its rather pleasant honey aroma.
Creeping clover is stunted, so it grows well among tall plants, forming under them a soft and tender solid carpet.
Pink porridge
The flower (Swedish clover) has a beautiful delicate pink color. This is a biennial plant, but more common perennial. Bright green stems are branched, about 30 to 90 centimeters high.
The leaves are elliptical in color from light to dark green. The flowers are painted in pink-white and white shades, collected in a spherical head of a rounded shape. The plant blooms in June and July.
About the miraculous red porridge
The most useful and widely cultivated is red clover. It grows throughout Siberia, as well as in Europe. It is an excellent fodder plant, the cultivation culture of which appeared in the sixteenth century.
Clover red is especially known as an oncoprotector. It is often recommended by herbalists in breast, lymphatic and ovarian cancers. It is used in the treatment of cancer in many countries of the world.
In addition, red porridge is a flower with a diuretic, expectorant, emollient, diaphoretic, antiseptic and excellent anti-inflammatory effect. Flowers are also used for anemia, cough, rheumatism, malaria, colds and other diseases.
Clover has been proven effective in various skin diseases: childhood eczema and psoriasis. It is also used for gynecological diseases.
Fluffy yellow clover
All the above types of porridge do not exhaust the huge variety of native species of this genus of plant.
You should pay attention to representatives with sunny golden flowers. These include perennial clovers very similar to each other: rustling, plain and dark-colored. All of them, like the aforementioned species, grow in nature on the fringes, meadows and clearings.
The prettiest of such porridges is plowed clover (popularly called “cats”). It is a small annual plant, heavily pubescent with delicate soft hairs.
Application
In general, porridge flowers are not only beautiful and useful for people. They help many garden plants. Especially good for apple trees: they do not allow weeds to grow, enrich the soil with nitrogen and look spectacular under a tree.
Also, porridge is used in agriculture as feed (hay) for livestock.
Something from the story
An excellent clinical effect was achieved in the treatment of a wide variety of diseases with the help of red clover in ancient China, as well as in America (more than a hundred years ago). With its help, they have long been treating diseases of the gallbladder, intestines, liver, and gout.
Both its leaves and flowers have long been used in alternative medicine as a source of calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, chromium, phosphorus and vitamins A, B, C. Red clover perfectly cleanses lymph and blood, normalizes the outflow of bile and the activity of the entire intestine.
Conclusion
Porridge in Russia grows in wastelands and has a reputation among the people as a weed. However, she fully deserved the right to be grown in front gardens, at least interspersed with other plants as a background. Clovers will give a pleasant freshness to the lawns thanks to the thick and juicy green leaves and bright lovely flowers.