The shamrock: A shrinking, growing story

Everything in America is bigger.

Everything in Ireland is greener.

The most obvious case in point is the shamrock.

Let’s dub this tale as The Mystery of the Shrinking Shamrock. Or vice versa, The Gigantic Shamrock.

Look around you as St. Patrick’s Day fast approaches. Green decorations abound.

You will spot billboards, posters and decorations highlighting the Irish shamrock. Ads sneak in shamrock images. Racks are filled with shamrock greeting cards with lots of good luck wishes. Bakeries ice their cookies with sugar shamrocks. Clothing stores tout greenness and shirts with shamrocks. School kids are drawing them. Stores that sell plants have pots and pots of live shamrocks.

This equation of St. Patrick’s Day = shamrocks has been around at least 1,000 years, dating to the time of a real priest named Patrick who is now credited with bringing Christianity to pagan Ireland.

This Emerald Isle of the North Atlantic Ocean, about two-thirds the size of Mississippi, must be magical. How else could the shamrock spread across the entire world as a symbol of good luck?

If you know anything about Irish history, its horrible chapters of subjugation and starvation, you will marvel at how this symbol was willingly trust upon us by Irish immigrants. One of my favorite quotes about Irish immigration comes from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “At first, America changed them all. Then they changed America.”

No matter your ethnic or cultural background, on Tuesday you likely will wear a spot of green and a shamrock plant will sit on your window sill for good luck. Although St. Patrick’s Day started as the Irish Catholics observing a saint’s feast day, today it is much more. Like so many of our holidays born of religion, March 17 has spread way out of bounds.

All this goodwill toward the shamrock originally sprang from the belief that St. Patrick used the three-petaled clover commonly found in Ireland to explain the Holy Trinity.

Much later, the shamrock/clover became a symbol of Irish rebellion and nationalism. You might not be surprised to learn that their British subjugators in the 18th and 19th centuries sometimes forbade their wearing of shamrocks, or even the color green.

The immigrants packed those two precious items in their proverbial baggage as they escaped to other parts of the world. Some had to become indentured servant and laborers just to leave. Over 100,000 perished on “coffin ships” or from malnutrition and disease from the journey. The popular “Titanic” movie with Leonardo DiCaprio was not made up. Many Irish were in steerage.

These Eire immigrants were not always welcomed, but that’s another story for another time.

The Gulf Coast was developing its resort legs in the 19th and early-20th centuries, so it is among American regions that benefited from Irish immigrant labor. They worked in hotels in Biloxi, Ocean Springs and Bay St. Louis. One section of Biloxi is still known as Irish Hill, an area where the immigrants settled after building the railroad through the swamps between New Orleans and Mobile.

The Irish joined a slew of other immigrants that became the Coast’s backbone, the all important business and political leaders and everyday families vital to a community.

And they didn’t hide their greenness.

“St. Patrick’s Day was duly observed by the sons of Erin and their friends,” this newspaper reported in 1894 as it did around every March 17. “Many wore the sprig of the Shamrock and green neckties and ‘St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning’ was played at the depot by a string band.”

“Considerable ‘wearing of the green’ was indulged in last Wednesday,” the Herald reported three years later in keeping with it’s St. Patrick’s Day reports on the Coast.

Today, those reports include parades and special green beer events and scads of corned beef and cabbage meals at local restaurants. Some Coast cities have painted their street stripes green and hung giant wooden shamrocks from city hall.

This brings us full circle to the real shamrock, or seamróg, pronounced sham-rogue in the Irish language.

I learned firsthand that there is a big difference between what the Irish call shamrock and what we call shamrock. Without going into too much detail, the Irish shamrock is in the clover family, or scientifically, Trifolium dubium. The modern American shamrock is often a wood sorrel, or Oxalis triangularis.

I haven’t learned yet when Americans started using the oxalis plant as our shamrock but it’s at least since the 1970s. When I was a cub reporter working on a newspaper in Alexandria, Va., my editor proudly gave me a single leafed stem of a “shamrock” that he said came from a plant his mother brought from Ireland.

He advised putting it in water and when it sprouts, to plant it. I did. It grew. Several years later when I temporarily left the newspaper biz to trek across Asia, I put the plant in my mother’s keeping. It thrived, and many years later I lost it, along with most everything else I owned, to Hurricane Katrina. Truth is, by then, I knew it wasn’t the real Irish shamrock.

In the interim, I’d taken another sabbatical year from the newsroom to be an Ambassadorial Scholar in Ireland, a program then sponsored by Rotary International to help spread world understanding.

At this point I’d best explain that my Americanism is two-pronged culturally. I’m half-Cajun from my father’s side of the family and half-Irish from Mom’s, and my red hair and fair skin screamed all-Irish that year I explored the villages of my ancestry.

I lived in an apartment on the River Lee, attended University College Cork and did Southern story-telling in pubs, civic groups and schools to fill the “ambassadorial” part of my duties. Because I looked Irish, no one guessed I wasn’t until I opened my mouth. I admit, though, after a year even I had picked up a bit of a lilt.

My sister Estelle flew to Ireland to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with me that year. On the momentous morning my flatmate, Lindsay, sent me into Cork to look for shamrocks to pin on our sweaters. She explained there would be vendors all over the streets selling them, having gone out the night before to the countryside to forage for them.

I passed vendor after vendor, looked in their boxes and saw dirty clumps of tiny clovers. Confused I inspected at lease a dozen more vendors. Finally I ask one of them, “Is that what you call a shamrock?”

She looked at me a bit wearily, “And what would you be calling it?”

Silently I paid her for four clumps of tiny clover and walked back to the apartment with my dubious green treasure.

“Lindsay,” I said, holding out one of the bunches. “Is this what you call shamrock?”

“Yes, but isn’t that what you call it?”

I took a piece of paper, drew a life-sized shamrock leaf, you know, that bigger tri-cornered oxalis plant usually sold in this country as shamrocks. You can fit a dozen of those tiny Irish clovers on the top of an oxalis shamrock.

Lindsay looked at the drawing in disbelief, then at me and replied in that slagging humorous way the Irish do best.

“Things really are bigger in America, aren’t they?”

Kat Bergeron, an award-winning veteran reporter and feature writer who specializes in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes this Gulf Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at:

BergeronKat@gmail.com

Or, at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923