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As he crossed the stage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to receive his award, Newman recited a poem he had composed for the occasion: “The secrets fell over/like a lover in clover/when I checked the government books/The blue zones are poor/the records no more/the 100-year-olds are all crooks.”

Early in Clover’s career, before she became a botanist, she worked at a segregated school for Mexican American students.

In one shake of a lamb’s tail, the Della Rossas were living like pigs in clover.

Together, Ivy and Shilling made a place for Gran to lie in her favorite glade, where the ground was soft and covered in clover, and nearby ran a gentle river.

Rembrandt van Rijn was famous, wealthy and generally in clover when he painted this majestic portrait that’s now at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. It is, of course, a self-portrait — a painting of the “ugly and plebeian face by which he was ill-favored,” as one early Rembrandt chronicler, Filippo Baldinucci, rather brutally put it.