‘Not lucky, but blessed’: Chelsea woman collects, preserves over 50,000 ‘lucky’ clovers

Most people know finding a four-leaf clover is a long-recognized symbol for good luck, especially in Ireland and on St. Patrick’s Day. 

Chelsea resident Frankie Osborn said her clover collection originally started off as a way for her to spend time with her kids and get them outdoors. Over the years, their enormous collection continued to grow and even caught the attention of Guinness World Records, “The Letterman Show” and local radio hosts and news stations.

“I love them; it’s almost like a sickness,” Osborn laughed.

Surveys from clover collectors say that for around every 5,000 three-leaf clovers, the most commonly found clover, there is a four-leaf clover somewhere in the mix. Any clover that has more than four leaves is exceptionally rare, said Osborn, who has been collecting and preserving clovers since 1992. Finding the rare clovers, Osborn said, even after all these years, brings her a certain thrill.  

Not only does she have a lot of four-leaf clovers, she has five-leaf, six-leaf, seven-leaf and even two nine-leaf clovers, all carefully stored and preserved in huge photo albums. She said the eight and nine-leaf clovers are so strange to see growing in nature because they look more like flowers. 

So far, she has eight or nine albums filled with clovers, and her collection totals to somewhere around 50,000 four-to-nine-leaf “lucky” clovers.

She said it took her and her kids several years to figure out how to properly preserve the clovers, and it’s now a process she shares with groups or individuals wanting to start a collection. 

“People will say, ‘Oh, I found some several years back, but I don’t know what happened to them, and they probably denigrated,’” Osborn said. “They’re so fragile.”

Osborn always first dries them out, in phone books or sometimes in old envelopes inside books because phone books aren’t as thick as they used to be. Then she puts them in photo albums stored in a dark place, “so they won’t fade,” along with a few other preservation tricks. She said a lot of people put them in picture frames in the light, which still preserves them but won’t keep them from fading. 

Osborn, who also grew up and went to school in Chelsea, said she was married for 30 years and lived on a big farm with a pasture she would constantly search for clovers. She sticks the clovers everywhere from her car manual to every available book in her and her parent’s house.

“There’s no telling how many I have that I don’t even know where they are,” she chuckled. 

She also keeps a logbook to record when and where she found the clovers. For the four-leaf clovers, she just records the month and how many, but for the rarer ones, she gets more specific and states where exactly she found them and on what date. 

Since she finds so many so often, she said it is hard to keep an accurate count, so it’s more like an estimate. 

She said when she’s at her office, she goes outside to walk her dog and will come back in with handfuls of four-leaf clovers. Osborn said she looks for them on the side of roads and nature spots. She’ll even knock on people’s front doors and ask if she can pick clovers in their yards. 

“I’ve only been run off one time. A guy said get off his property or whatever, but all the rest of the times they’ve been nice about it,” she said.

She insists she rarely looks for them over an hour. She usually does what she calls “a quick scan” to see if it’s more or less likely that the clover patch contains clovers with more than three leaves. 

Fairly quickly, she said, she’s able to tell if some are there or not. Usually if she is able to find a few, there are many in the area. When she does look for an hour, she is capable of walking away with about 300 clovers with more than three leaves. 

People ask her how she’s able to find them so quickly, to which she replies that it’s just been easy for her. 

“It started out as just a talent, but as I researched a lot about the different types of clovers and the Irish meanings of shamrocks and how St. Patrick taught the gospel by the shamrock and how it represented the Holy Trinity, I was very interested,” she said.

She added that she enjoys sharing a different testimony with people than what they’re used to. She always ends church lectures by going out to look for four-leaf clovers.

Now that her kids are grown, she continues her clover collecting traditions and has made it a theme for opening her own business: Lucky Realty of Alabama LLC, located at an office in Chelsea. Because of the amount of Irish-themed clovers and decorations she has, she said, she transfered her passion of clovers to her realty brand and decorating her office. 

“One thing about using that as my business tool is people will remember you. I’ve gone to meetings and meet-and-greets and things like that, and they always say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re that clover girl,’” Osborn said.

When people tell her she’s lucky — which is often, she said — she tells them, “not lucky, but blessed,” which she made her new tagline for her realty business. 

To learn more, go to facebook.com/frankieosborn22.