By: Aiden Ding

Gardener Yoshiharu Watanabe broke the Guinness World Record for the clover with the most leaves. Legend goes that four-leaf clovers are meant to bring good luck, since finding a four-leaf clover is incredibly rare. Yoshi found a 63 leaf clover in his garden, and broke the previous record by seven leaves.

Yoshi claimed that it took a significantly long time to count all the leaves. “Because the leaves are smaller than the standard clover that you know and love, it’s hard to count the number of leaves. When I counted this record-breaking clover, it took me over an hour,” he said. He made sure he counted correctly by placing a label on each leaf he counted.

Yoshiharu stated that he found a clover patch in his garden. Whenever he stepped into the great outdoors and saw a clover with four or more leaves, he would bring it home and plant it in his great clover garden.

A couple of years before he set the record, he grew a remarkable 20-leaf clover and became inspired to break the standing record of a 56-leaf clover found in 2009. The previous record was held by another Japanese resident called Shigeo Obara of Hanamaki City.

Yoshiharu came extremely close when he found a 55-leaf clover, but the clover stopped growing when it was just short of the record-breaking. But the gardener didn’t give up. Yoshi made his fantastic clover by simply helping his plants pollinate and bringing in any clovers with more than 3 leaves!

So, how rare, really, is a four-leaf clover? Most people estimate it to be about a 1 in 10,000 chance, but a survey in 2017 proved it wrong putting the chances as 1 in 5,000. A five-leaf clover is even more rare, because the same 2017 survey put it as 1 in 24,000!

The clover champion claims he is “very happy” to have finally achieved his long goal. He also said: “People say that a four-leaved clover brings you happiness, so it would be great if this 63-leaved clover would bring surprise and pleasure to people.” . So next time you see a clover, you’ll know how lucky you truly are!