Sweet Clover Market - What's In A Name

A close friend of mine suggested we might aim to identify with our geographic location since the store is built on ideals that value local places. The names Brown’s Trace, Indian Brook, and others were suggested. Quickly it became apparent that the “place” we honor and aim to preserve is not only a location, but also a broader community idea. At the same time, Heather had been poking around stories of how Vermont came to have the Red Clover as the state flower.

When Heather first suggested Sweet Clover Market, I responded with the standard lukewarm response of “put it on the list.” It was an increasingly large list. She spoke about the humble clover and its vital role in agriculture in Vermont. The honeybees and cows both depend on the clover. Depending on your source of information, Sweet Clover is a legume, botanically different from red and white clover. According to other sources, sweet clover is used to describe a family of flowering plants. We think of the name in both this literal sense and we also think of sweet as a descriptive term, as in “life is sweet.” We asked folks from the community to complete an online survey comparing three names, Sweet Clover, Red Fern Natural Foods, and Real Good Food. The results showed that Sweet Clover most clearly communicates the character of the store.

I spent hours as a girl searching for four leaf clovers. The clover links me to the agricultural roots of my family. All my grandparents were farmers and my mom’s father would pick four leaf clovers when he’d come upon them in his cow pasture. He has since passed away, and my mom has part of his collection of now-brown clovers mounted on her dining room wall. Heather tells a story that during a visit with her mom in New Orleans while we were in school in Boston, her mom randomly stopped the car and said that she’d be right back. Her mom had previously staked out the location of a patch of four leaf clover, and she returned to the car with this special little plant as a gift.

We’d love to hear your stories about clover. Please email them to us at ellen@sweetclovermarket.com and let us know if it is ok to share your stories with others on the Sweet Clover website. Thanks and have a sweet day! ... back