White Clover (Trifolium pratense) — a perennial herbaceous plant of the legume family, widely found on meadows, pastures, and grazing lands in Ukraine. The plant has a well-developed taproot and a short main stem, from which flowering stems 15 to 60 cm tall arise. Leaves are trifoliate, with broad-oval leaflets that fold together at night. Flowers are small, red or pink, arranged in rounded or slightly elongated inflorescences, blooming from spring until frost. The fruit is an egg-shaped, single-seeded pod.
White Clover is valued as a high-protein forage plant and is an excellent honey plant. In folk medicine, upper leaflets and inflorescences are used because the plant contains glycosides trifolin and isotrifolin, as well as isorhamnetin, quercetin, asparagine, tyrosine, organic acids, sitosterols, vitamins, and carotene. Clover exhibits expectorant, diuretic, sudorific, hemostatic, and antiseptic properties.
This plant is widely used in agriculture and gardening, including for creating forage areas and improving soil fertility. Clover enriches soil with nitrogen due to symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, making it an important component of crop rotations and ecologically sustainable agrotechnologies.
