45-year-old Yoshiharu Watanabe can rightfully consider himself the world’s luckiest man after setting a new Guinness Record by growing a clover with 63 individual leaves.
What is luckier than a four-leaf clover? Well, a five-leaf clover, of course. By that logic, the more leaves a clover has, the more luck it brings, so Yoshiharu Watanabe may just be the luckiest man alive because he is the first to ever grow a clover with 63 leaves. His amazing story began in 2009 when he started picking up clovers with more than three leaves and planting them in his home garden. The little plant is pretty resilient, so all he had to do was cross-pollinate to obtain exceptional specimens with up to 20 leaves. It was at this moment that he started dreaming about setting a new world record, but he never dreamed of doing so with a 63-leaf clover.
Photo: Yoshiharu Watanabe
“Clover is a common plant found everywhere, so whenever I saw a four-leaved, five-leaved, or seven-leaved clover near paddy fields or parks, I took it back home,” Watanabe told Guinness Records. “Since the number of leaves has increased year by year, I have been aiming for the Guinness World Records title ever since.”
The old record that Yoshiharu Watanabe had been eyeing had been set in 2009 by another Japanese man, Shigeo Obara, in 2009, with a 56-leaf clover. It wasn’t the easiest of challenges, but as he kept growing clovers with more and more leaves each year, the amateur gardener started dreaming about beating his countryman’s record.
Photo: Yoshiharu Watanabe
By 2020, Watanabe’s cross-pollination technique had already yielded impressive results. That year, he grew a 49-leaf clover, and the year after that, he came really close to tying the record with a 55-leaf plant. But then something unexpected happened – the number of leaves stopped growing.
“Sometimes the number of leaves can go down, or sometimes you end up with the normal three-leaf clover,” the gardener explained. “We know that genetics are involved in a higher number of leaves, yet we don’t exactly know how it works.”
But just as he was about to give up hope of ever breaking Obara’s record, in 2023, Yoshiharu Watanabe managed to grow a clover plant with no less than 63 individual 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,” Watanabe explained.
