Elzada Urseba Clover was born in Auburn, Nebraska in 1897, the seventh of nine children of Maynard French Clover and Sarah Gates Clover.[2] She had six sisters (Alice, Mabel, Bessie, Vida, Cora, and Maud) and two brothers (Maynard and Verne).[3] She grew up on her father's farm and attended high school in the nearby town of Peru. Her mother died in 1913 and her father remarried around 1925 and moved to Texas, where he set up as a farmer near Alamo.[4] Clover began her career as a public school teacher in 1919, working first in Nebraska and later in Texas.; she also supervised an Indian mission school in the latter state. She was graduated from Nebraska State Teachers College in 1930 and went on to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for her M.S. (1932) and Ph.D. (1935) degrees.[5] The subject of her doctoral thesis was the vegetation of the lower Rio Grande Valley.