A vote for the most overlooked species

 If a person were looking at this beautiful stretch of Zarzamora Creek, what would he or she see?

The great white egrets are hard to miss. So are the bald cypress and cattails.

But what species would the observer most likely miss? What would be most likely overlooked?

My guess is horseherb, Calyptocarpus vialis. It’s also known as straggler daisy, hierba del caballo and lawnflower. It’s easy to overlook because it’s everywhere. It’s the groundcover around here. It even grows in the deep shade and caliche of the backyard.

It’s a perennial herb, semi-evergreen, in Asteraceae. It has opposite, simple, deltoid leaves that are serrate. The Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center says the yellow auxiliary flowers bloom March to November — year-round without frost.

I saw the lovely little flowers at Christmas, but not since the frost.

And so, as we walked along the creek, the wind whipping and a norther coming, I was looking at stands of horseherb, wondering how quickly they’d flower after that frost.

The walk along the creek is partly a check on things such as horseherb, but it’s also a check on my psyche — my self, soul, spirit or whatever-it-is. The check is something simple, like checking the dipstick on the truck to see whether it has enough oil.

If I walk along the creek and don’t come home wondering about at least one thing, something’s wrong. And the problem is not with the environment, but with me.

Jim Harrison’s poem “Debtors” was featured on The Writer’s Almanac” the other day. The poem’s a meditation about the notion of “borrowed time.”

We don’t really have time. We have only the moment. The rest is either planning or anxiety or some kind of fidgeting about the future, or memories, which is all we have of the past.

The poet remembered holding the hand of his dying grandfather, and now his grandfather’s four sons are also gone — out of borrowed time. The poet thinks of his own borrowed time — and suddenly this pops up:

What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

It’s the same idea as my almost-daily check on the fluid levels in my psyche. These walks along the creek won’t last forever, so I try to see what I can while I can. If I come back empty handed, well, it might be time to check my engine.