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Crape MurderA common care practice could damage your crape myrle. |
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Transcript: Crape Myrtle
Stop right there. For one reason or another, chopping down Crape Myrtles is a popular winter sport here in Texas. We feel a need to chop them off about this high. All that leaves is ugly stubs and destroys the beautiful structure of the tree.Crape Myrtles have an attractive exfoliating bark that really forms a beautiful winter structure in the landscape. By mowing them off like that, we ruin that structure and then when regrowth begins, it may break off in a summer storm because it's very weakly attached.
Crape Myrtles need almost no pruning. You can remove some suckers that come up from the base. You can also prune out some twiggy interior growth, if you like. And if you have to remove a limb, make sure and cut it flush where it joins another limb and don't leave a stub like this; they'll just die and be left there inside the structure of the tree.
If you want to plant a Crape Myrtle, choose one that's the right size. We have Crape Myrtles all the way from three feet high all the way to 35 feet tall. Don't plant one that you have to prune to keep in shape. We have some good information on our web site that tells you the size of the trees, various bloom colors that you can choose from, even ones that have attractive cinnamon-colored exfoliating bark, and most importantly, which ones are resistant to powdery mildew.
With your common sense tip on avoiding Crape murder, I'm Skip Richter.
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Last Updated:
July 6, 2006