Don't Top The Crapemyrtles

My blog needs a picture and I would like to get on my soapbox for a moment and state my position on the great crapemurder debate of the last few decades. This is a photo of some crapemyrtles at my Studio 3 design project site, the E.E. Cooley Cotton Mill grounds and environs. This is what happens when you leave crapemyrtles alone. Would you not rather look at this all winter than the stubs that remain where people have topped crapemyrtles all over town, all over the south? I had a neighbor in Chapel Hill who had some nice 30 foot crapemyrtles that she, one afternoon in February, cut back by fifteen feet or so. I asked her (politely) why she did this and she could only come up with the reason that this is what you are supposed to do, you need to cut them back before the ACC tournament.

I have pruned hundreds of these in my career as a landscaper. All this tree needs is about a half hours worth of thinning. Remove branches that are dead, dying or crossing, and remove some of the inward growing branches to improve air circulation (reducing risk of sooty mold). That's it. Topping the trees causes buds to break from below the bark, resulting in vigorous, suckering type growth which is too weak to support the blooms. These weak branches then bend over or snap, which doesn't matter really because they are just going to be cut off at the end of the season anyway. A good example in Starkville are the ones along the entrance to McDonald's behind Strange Brew. It seems to me that those who prune crapemyrtles this way view the tree as strictly a producer of color. The thinning technique that I describe results in a tree that looks good year round. Or, as the photo proves, you can do nothing at all to the tree and it still looks pretty darned good. The visual interest comes from a pattern created by gradients: multiple thick trunks at bottom give way to multiples of multiple thin twigs at the top, a steady visual rhythm of coarse to thin texture. Put a bird feeder in it and you have a middle ground, a stage for dynamic movement through which one can view the background in the distance. If you lop off the crown in the misguided assumption that it will produce more bloom next summer you loose all that dynamic potential.

This is at a smaller scale than is generally discussed in Studio 3, but I saw the tree on my site and wanted to share these thoughts with everybody.