Yerba de Tajo (Eclipta alba)
- Family: Aster (Asteraceae)
- Flowering: June-October.
- Field Marks: This member of the aster family is distinguished by its opposite leaves and small heads of white flowers containing both ray and disk flowers.
- Habitat: Wet, often disturbed soil; fallow fields, old fields, bogs, along streams, meadows, around ponds and lakes, marshes.
- Habit: Erect or spreading annual herbs with fibrous roots.
- Stems: Erect or spreading, hairy, to 3 feet long, often rooting at the nodes.
- Leaves: Opposite, simple, elliptic to linear-lanceolate, pointed at the tip, tapering to the base, with or without a few small teeth, hairy, up to 5 inches long, up to 1 1/4 inches broad; leaf stalks short or absent.
- Flowers: Many crowded into a head, each head up to 1/2 inch across and subtended by 10-12 narrow, hairy, green bracts, the outer flowers white and ray-like, the inner white and tubular, forming a disk.
- Sepals: 0.
- Petals: Some white, short, ray-like, others white, 4-parted, forming a short tube.
- Stamens: 5.
- Pistils: Ovary inferior, hairy.
- Fruits: Achenes obovoid, brown, hairy at the tip, about 1/10 inch long.
- Notes: Recently this plant has been called E. prostrata by some.
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