Sorry don't know anything about trees in our region (I live 30 miles north of you) but that is some cool looking bark.
There's a tree person on here somewhere.
Tree

Looks like Hackberry to me. Celtis occidentalis

Looks like hackberry to me too

I agree - hackberry

Hackberry. They seed like mad. Their goal is take over the world.

Lots of trees seed like mad though.

Here is a link that might be useful: hackberry

Thank you! Thank you! I do believe y'all are correct on Hackberry after reading online about it. Not sure if hackberry is desirable or not but I am just thrilled to have an ID! Thank you! I'm off to google more about it.

The seed is edible (tastes like mild coffee), birds love it.

It depends on how desperate you are for trees as to whether you'll find them desirable.

Our neighbors on both sides of us when we lived in Fort Worth had hackberries and I pulled out millions of seedlings every year so they wouldn't take over every square inch of the yard.

We have them scattered around our 10 acres of woodland here and I left them alone there because the oaks and other more desirable trees shade the woodland too much for the hackberries to take over the woodland, but any hackberry trees that pop up on the edge of the woodland close to the grassland part of our acreage, I remove because otherwise the 4 open acres of grassland will turn into a hackberry forest.

If they aren't near a place where you are going to have a proper yard-type landscape or garden, they won't necessarily be a problem.

When I was a kid in Fort Worth, my relatives referred to them as "trash trees" and I share that opinion, but the birds like them, so I leave them in the woods, far from the house and yard, for the birds to enjoy.

We have mostly left our woodland in its native state, except we have removed cedar trees whenever and wherever we can, and we have removed poison ivy and greenbrier that was too close to the pathways. I won't hardly take out a tree of any kind because they are so beneficial to the environment, but we are on a cedar eradication binge on our property and we aren't too fond of the hackberries either.

Dawn

This one kind of surprised me a little, I always thought hackberry was related to ash. Evidently it's of the elm family.
I thought it was interesting to find there seem to be a lot of people that hate them. It's classified as invasive.
I guess in the right scenario this may be the case. But, in the dryer, harsher climate like in western Oklahoma, I prefer to think of it as a survivor. There are dozens of species that are 10 times more invasive. Cedar and maple make them look like amateurs.
There seems to be some that feel it has almost no beneficial use. I disagree, as firewood, it burns very similar to ash. The berries, while difficult to gather enough to do any good, can be used to make jelly, or even wine. As they are highly prized by wildlife, competition can make it difficult to harvest enough to do either.
Native Americans used the berries, for food, medicine and even dye.

It reseeds just about as much as elms do, so I guess I am not surprised they are in the same family.

Pretty much everything in our woodland acres provides shelter or food for something, which kind of explains why we have left most of it in place. Even with poison ivy and greenbrier, wildlife depend on the berries for food, so we only keep those plants cut back from the pathways instead of actually trying to remove them. We made an exception for cedars, and take out all we can, although a million new ones spring up in their place. They are just too big of a fire hazard to have anywhere close to the house or other structures.

I don't mind hackberries in general. They aren't the prettiest trees, but they do provide shade and shelter for wildlife. It is just they can dominate in areas with plentiful rainfall and crowd out more desirable plants. I just don't like hackberries in a home landscape like ours where the soil, the climate and the annual rainfall encourage them to grow like weeds. In Fort Worth, they were in our neighbor's yard to our east, and long before we bought our place, the tree trunks had grown right around the chain-link fence and swallowed it up. It was just bizarre to see fencing come right out of the middle of tree trunks. We put up a wood privacy fence to screen off our swimming pool because the neighbors didn't want the tree-swallowing hackberry trees removed, so we couldn't remove the chain link fence. On the western property line, a hackberry would lose big old branches in severe thunderstorms and they'd fall on our shed, our garage or on our power line, knocking out our power. From our point of view from having them there adjacent to our property, there wasn't any reason to really like them or appreciate them.

We have several dozen different kinds of trees on our property, and other than the cedars, the only ones we have deliberately removed are the honey locust trees. They sucker and spread so if you leave one alone and let it be, soon you'll have an entire grove that just spreads and spreads and spreads. If every honey locust and every hackberry tree on our property died tomorrow, I'd be thrilled. I wouldn't miss the cedars either. Once we remove cedars, we get oodles of other trees and understory plants that spring up where the cedars used to be and they offer a better variety of food for the wildlife and are less dangerous in wildfires.

If I lived in a drier part of the state where trees are less common, I'd probably appreciate the hackberries more....but where I live they are as weedy as bermuda grass and almost as aggressive. At the southeastern corner of our woodland, the war for domination rages on between red oaks and hackberries. With a little assistance from humans, in that particular spot, the red oaks are winning.

Thanks everyone! Sure appreciate your input! Right now I value them because like Dawn mentioned, up here on the "prairie" we have a shortage of good shade! I don't believe they would be there if it weren't for the presence of the spring fed creek. My thoughts are that they won't be as invasive as in other environments. Thanks for the heads up- I will keep an eye on any spreading and hope to plant a more desirable native oak among them as we improve the land. I also share the sentiments about cedar. I really do value all trees but That cedar is a serious threat. Thanks again!

Dawn:

My allergies and I adore you for eradicating red cedar!
Thank you, thank you, thank you,

We have not found any red cedar on our son's place, but he has an abundance of hackberry. He has another tree that I would like to identify but I don't have a picture of it. It is a medium size tree growing in full sun and it produces a thick hard fibrous pod. The pod shape is like a large Roma bean, but it is about 8 inches long and very wide. The seeds are very round, but flat and look like the wood plugs that they put in furniture to cover screw heads. The deer like it, but since I have only seen one tree, it must not be invasive because it drops beans everywhere. Some pods stay on the upper branches all winter.

I feel silly answering your question because you're more well versed than I. But could it be an Indian bean tree? I only recognize the Indian bean tree because they came with our property. And they don't grow very well, here.

bon

Carol, From your description of the seeds, I think the tree likely is a Kentucky Coffeetree. I have seen them in various places in Love County, but not in big groves....usually just a tree or two here or there.

They rarely, if ever, become invasive because of the amount of scarification the seeds need before they can sprout. Some scientists think that some animal that now likely has gone extinct probably ate the pods and then, during the journey of the seeds through the animal's digestive tract, scarification occurred and the seeds were spread wherever those animals defecated. As tough as these trees are (the ones here didn't even die in 2011 even though some oaks did), if their seed germinated easily, we'd likely be overrun by them. Settlers collected the seeds from the pods, roasted them and used them as an admittedly inferior coffee substitute.

It took me 5 or 6 years of wondering what they were and asking around and researching before I finally figured out that the trees I saw here were Kentucky Coffeetrees.

Nowadays, if you collect the seed pods (the seeds are poisonous to some animals but not to others) in order to grow more of the Kentucky Coffee Trees, you usually can get some of the seeds to germinate if you file them and then soak them in water for a while before planting them, similar to what one does to get better germination rates with morning glory seeds.

Bon, The seeds inside the pods of the Indian Bean trees are flat and sort of papery. Southern Catalpa trees grow in great abundance a few miles south of us in the Thackerville area. I see them in front yards a lot, but don't know if they are native trees that were there before the homes were built or if they were planted there by the homeowners. They grow like mad in deep, sandy soil. I've never seen them further north in the part of the county where we live and where the soil more commonly is clay than sand. When they are in bloom, they are so spectacularly gorgeous, but they sure do make a big mess when the seed pods shed from the trees.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Images: Seeds of Kentucky Coffeetrees