Texas Ash Fraxinus albicans
Texas Ash is a plant native to the lower 48 states. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Fraxinus albicans, commonly called the Texas ash, is a species of tree in the olive family (Oleaceae). It is native to North America, where it is found from eastern Texas and southern Oklahoma in the United States, to the state of Durango in Mexico. Its natural habitat is in dry, rocky slopes, often over limestone. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 8 derived from its U.S. range
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~149 caterpillar species
Fraxinus supports ~149 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Fraxinus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Related plants
More Fraxinus →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (14) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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