By: Michael Xia

Yoshiharu Watanabe found a 63 leaf clover, so does that mean he is the luckiest of the luckiest men?

Yoshiharu’s record beat the previous winner by seven leaves. The new record-setting plant boasts 63 leaves takes the place of a 56-leaf clover grown by Shigeo Obara, also from Japan.

Yoshiharu said he started off with a clover patch in his garden. Whenever he was out in a park or anywhere and saw a clover with four or more leaves, he would bring it home and add it to his garden. The gardener let some of the clovers pollinate naturally in the open air but also pollinated some by hand. A few years ago, successfully grew a 20-leaf clover and then became inspired to try and break the record.

Different studies give different figures on how rare cloves with many leaves are, some stating that 1 in every 10,000 clovers is four-leafed. It’s even luckier to find a five-leaf clover at just 1 in 24,000!

When he spotted his current record-setting plant and plucked it from the ground, a quick guess told him it would tie with the 56-leaf clover. Yoshiharu said it took a long, long time to count all the leaves on the record-breaking clover. He put small numbers on it to keep track of the leaves. When he began to painstakingly count each leaf he was ‘very happy’ to discover he had broken the record.

So do you agree he is very lucky?