We had 3 of them when we live in the high desert in Calf. Nice looking trees. They have a nice yellowish/orange color in the fall.

Guys, I believe I have Texas Ash seedlings and a few cedar elm. I'm not positive if they are ash or soapberry though. I have both growing wild in the thicket behind my house. How could we verify? Would a picture help?

I too have a beautifully growing Texas Ash shading my back southern-facing porch from the brutal Texas summer sun. I love butterflies and have studied them all my life and was quite surprised to see flocks of Hackberry butterflies and Red Admiral butterflies all over the ends of the branches feeding all day, since ash is not on the diet of either of those species. Quite a sight, but when I saw the curled up leaves I suspected something was attacking the tree. I assumed the butterflies were sucking up sap from the leaves, but y'all's posts have helped me - THANKS!! Now to return the favor, since we know these are aphids, I have the perfect solution...LADYBUGS. These cute little insects are quite the predators and their favorite meal is aphids. I'm heading out today to a local nursery that sells them in a little mesh bag. All you have to do is put them in the refrigerator, where they go into a kind of "cryogenic" sleep until you are ready for to release them. Just take them out and they will come right back to life. I'm going to start releasing handfuls near my ash tree today.

I have one, but don't know the growth rate. I don't see a growth rate in my Native Texas Plants book either. But I will say that from the time a sapling pops out of the ground until I mow again (about once a week), they've grown about 8". I don't know how old the tree was when we moved in, but it was about 15' tall and had a diameter of about 7". Now, 13 years later, it is about 25-30' tall and has a diameter of 18". It seems to grow faster than the pecans we planted when we moved in, but then we bought them at a nursery & they had transplant shock I'm sure. They do NOT grow faster than a juniper/mtn cedar or the dogwoods my neighbor planted.