mdo, I can shed a little light on this: With the Emamectin Benzoate-style treatments available now, tradenamed Tree-age (The 'a' has the two little umlauts or whatever they're called above it, and the word is pronounced like the word triage), it is reasonable to expect two solid years of control from a single treatment, and quite possibly three years. For high-value trees like yours, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. Alternatively, the Imidacloprid insecticides will give a single year's control but are easier to apply. So even that's not a crazy thing to do. Environmentally speaking, either one of these methods is fairly low risk to surrounding organisms, being either injected straight into the trunk, or spread on the ground and soaked in via watering or rainfall, depending on which chemistry you reach for. The other half of your question I can answer too: What seems to happen with EAB is similar to other exotic insect invasions-there is a ramping up period, a period of overwhelming infestation, and then, just as you'd probably expect,a leveling off period after the insects have killed most of their hosts. So if you do happen to save yours during the hot time, you would still need to treat to have the surety of protecting the trees, but overall pressure would level off a great deal. These two lines of thought are straight out of very recent arborist's convention/seminars, so they are up to date. The relevance of this winter's cold temps was also a hot topic (Buh dum bum), but in reality, most thought is that while some of the less-deeply positioned larvae may indeed be killed, EAB has two larval forms and one of them is positioned deeper into the trunk, likely meaning the weather will have fairly little impact one way or the other. We can always hope though! +oM

yes it can survive ... quite easily .... trees are fully capable of healing themselves... so let it do it itself ... anything you do is contrary to nature ... protect it from the destructor ... lol ... seriously .... put up some protection .... another injury might finish it off ..... ken

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.

most tree farms don't sell retail however, you can browse the trees at Southwest nursery on Sandy Lake as long as you have someone in the business with you. if you browse by yourself you need to know your stuff and what your looking at. many trees sold as texas ash may not be...