Crape Myrtle Care/Pruning Tips

Crape murder is a national crisis! When caring for a crape myrtles, be careful not to over-prune them which will cause unsightly knots, uncontrollable growth and lifelong damage. Take al look at these tips to learn how to properly care for a crape myrtle to keep it healthy and beautiful for its whole life. Keep in mind, crape myrtle care starts when you pick it out and plant it. Be cautious to choose the right variety that won't outgrow the location you have in mind, forcing you to aggressively prune it. Don't forget your safety glasses and goggles! Transcript: Today I'm here to talk about the proper pruning of crape myrtles. You know crape myrtles have been a much-maligned plant in the landscape over the last 20 or 30 years ago. It seems like everybody has a an itching to just prune them as hard as they can. And even though these are really tough trees and they will often survive such pruning, you basically lose control of the plant once you start pruning it that way. It's really important to start with a crape myrtle the variety that's going to fit in the right spot in the landscape. Because we have so many different choices of crape myrtles and different sizes and growth forms and flower colors for that matter. There are plenty of different crape myrtles to choose from, so you don't choose a variety that's going to overgrow the space you had in mind. Looking at the tree we have behind us here, it's not too old of a crape myrtle tree and it's been well maintained, but it does have a few issues in it that could be taken care of. A young tree might often have more actual stems that will develop in the trunks and if you have too many stems to start with, you're going to end up having a thicket of trunks and there’s nothing really wrong with that for the plant health, but it does aesthetically not look as nice as some well-spaced trunks that have low branches on them. But this one has good form, we can raise the canopy a little bit on this older tree, we don't need to worry about limiting the number of stems because it's got three nice trunks, and then we just have two other issues to deal with in the tree that are major considerations and that's places where we have two crossing branches. These branches are very small, but they cross and rub each other and they wound each other, and that creates entry ways for diseases and insects to cause problems. And then we have two major stems here in the middle that are crossing each other. We don't want things crossing through the canopy and interfering with other main branches. We need to decide which of these two stems we might want to take out of the tree. So I have the three trunks here, a lower branch on on this stem is crossing the main trunk or the main leader stem on this particular trunk, so in the case of this I could remove this here and allow this branch to stay, but I am more likely to want to remove this branch here and allow the main stem of this other trunk to remain to continue the upright growth. And then the last step is if you want to do any kind of reduction in height or remove the seed heads, there are certain pruning methods that you use to do that. If you want to do any kind of pruning back below a seed head, you just look down the stem below that seed head and you look for little buds and these buds occur every place a leaf was attached to that twig last year. And those will what will give rise to new branch growth. But if you do need to reduce any branches height wise or maybe you've just got a long branch that's way out of bounds, you basically have two choices on that you can completely remove that branch back to its source or you can shorten the branch by doing what we call a reduction cut. Instead of making a pruning cut above a bud, you can prune down a branch to an existing what used to be a bud but it's now a lateral branch, to shorten that branch. That way the natural growth of the tree is retained because that pruning cut does not stimulate any new growth for the branch that we left behind which will continue to grow and branch and flower from there.