By Laura Hunt Miller
Years ago I walked into work and found my coworker in a tizzy. It was pruning season, and the targets, crepe myrtles. “It’s not pruning!” she said, “it’s crepe murder!!”
Crepe murder? Everyone trimmed their crepes I thought. I was even a little ashamed I had not trimmed the ones in my yard yet. But now to find out it wasn’t necessary? Intriguing, I needed to know more.
The crepe myrtle feels like a natural part of the South, but it is a native of China, the Koreas and Japan. The Tang dynasty prized the little guys 500 years before the Renaissance was a hit in Europe. King Louis XVI’s own botanist brought the plant to South Carolina around the start of the French Revolution. From there the tree spread across the South, until there was one (or more) in nearly every yard.
And then the “pruning” began.
Some plant species benefit from “hard cutting,” that is an aggressive pruning that removes 50-75% of a plant’s canopy, or leafy branches. The cut-back operates like a reset for an overgrown or damaged plant. Other plants benefit from an annual trimming of the outermost foliage, which produces new, healthy growth, and can help shape a plant to make it more attractive. But plenty of plants need neither of these upkeep techniques.
True pruning is only done in order to: remove branches that cross and rub against each other, which creates wounds and entry points for disease; remove dead, dying, or diseased wood to prevent spread; remove branches that are structurally compromised, hanging over structures, or posing a genuine hazard; and to selectively remove interior canopy branches so light and air can help reduce places for harmful fungi to grow.
Crepe myrtles it turns out, do not need hard cutting or annual trimming. An occasional pruning for the reasons aforementioned is more than enough to take care of them. So, if crepe myrtles do not need to be seasonally cut back, how did this practice become such a deeply ingrained ritual?
Like most less-than-great habits, it probably started with a feel-good moment. Crepe myrtles do flower on new growth, and aggressive cutting can produce a dramatic flush of flowers. The problem is that those blooms arrive on thin, weak new branches that cannot support them. These lovely new buds spend their summer flopping over, especially after a good rain, but on mature growth they can hold their own.
There are also the innocent mistakes. The first crepe myrtle cultivars were introduced to our market before they had matured enough to know their adult dimensions. Homeowners planted large-growing varieties in spaces that couldn’t accommodate them and then, rather than address the mismatch by moving the plants, simply chopped off the tops of their trees annually. New crepe myrtle owners saw this practice and thought it was normal.
It is also possible that pruning legitimate damage from occasional freezes became a generalized habit, spreading neighbor to neighbor until whole states were doing it every year regardless of whether winter had hurt their crepes or not.
Then there are the conspiracy theories, like landscapers in need of off-season work deciding to convince property owners that crepe myrtles need heavy annual pruning. Because everyone knows landscapers have been meeting in secret for the past 75 years or so to make sure they don’t lose this precious revenue stream, mwahahaha.
Horticulturists however say inherited habits that don’t actually do plants any good are pretty common because the results of the practices are predictable and superficially attractive, like a flush of floppy flowers. I grew up with this cult practice myself and I thought docking crepe myrtles was the norm. Until one fateful trip to Charleston. Remember that French botanist I mentioned earlier? He led the planting of some of the earliest crepe myrtles in the United States over 200 years ago, and they are still here.
As I walked down Charleston’s historic neighborhoods one evening, I saw a series of large, slender armed trees with beautiful striped bark and perky foliage. They looked familiar, but the scale was not. Then I inhaled in shock as I recognized them; they were crepe myrtles.
But they couldn’t be. Their trunks were so wide, and they were as tall as the two- and three-story historic homes they stood next to. But there they were, as grand as an oak and as graceful as a willow.
The historic crepe myrtles in Charleston made every other one I had seen in my life look like laughable caricatures, whispers of the mighty roar that these kings of trees made. It made me wonder; were all the crepes I grew up with capable of becoming such venerable wonders? Had we all been keeping a host of gentle giants dwarfed, simply out of a habit of ignorance?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. The world’s tallest known crepe myrtle, affectionately called the “Lord Crape Myrtle,” has been growing in China’s Guizhou Province for nearly 1,400 years. It stands more than 110 feet tall, roughly the height of an eleven-story building, and blooms three times a year.
Closer to home, Shreveport is home to one of the largest single-trunk crape myrtles in the United States. Planted in the 1950s, it now stands more than 50 feet tall with a trunk over eight feet in circumference.
After over 100 years of horticultural tinkering, the crepe myrtle family now spans a wide range of mature sizes without the need to drastically cut them back. If you want something under 4 feet, dwarf cultivars like Petite Pinkie exist. You can put them in a container or a perennial flower bed, and never need a ladder to prune it.
If you are looking for something in the 4-to-12-foot range, try a semi-dwarf option like Tonto, and save all that money you’ve been throwing at annual trimmings. For those looking for a medium tree, varieties like Sioux grow to 15-to-20 feet of a gorgeous tree.
If you desire a graceful giant like those in Charleston, plant a Natchez. Their canopies spread over 20 feet with spectacular cinnamon exfoliating bark and red-orange fall foliage, and grow 3 to 5 feet per year.
Now for those folks that want to hold onto their shears and tree-topping beliefs something fierce, let’s look a little more into the science of the matter.
The North Carolina Cooperative Extension states that “topping,” the aggressive cutting back that removes the whole upper parts of a crepe myrtle, stresses the trees because it forces new growth simultaneously across the entire canopy. The Cooperative is seeing increased prevalence of Crepe Myrtle Bark Scale specifically on topped trees in their area, a condition where an invasive insect produces damage that results in thick black mold covering the tree. The University of Florida also notes that topping encourages new growth too dense for air movement or light penetration, which is precisely the stagnant, shaded microclimate that fungi prefer to grow in.
Closer to home, the LSU AgCenter has been preaching from this pulpit for years, putting it plainly: crape myrtles require little if any pruning. They state that annual cutting can shorten the lives of trees, and cause unsightly knobbing at the cut site (I think we have all seen examples of these). LSU horticulturist Allen Owings at one point declared that “one of the ten commandments of gardening should be: thou shalt not top crape myrtles.” Amen brother.
If the science of the matter doesn’t faze you, consider the economics. Local professional trimming services quote $75 to $400 per tree depending on size and access; let’s say $150 to be conservative for a typical suburban tree. That would put the price for trimming three crepe myrtles, not an unusual number on a Louisiana lot, at $450 a year. Over twenty years you could be spending upwards of $10,000 on a problem you don’t actually have, and that’s if you only have three crepe myrtles. The correct plant for the right space on the other hand, purchased once, requires little to no annual intervention.
If after reading all this you still can’t bring yourself to part with your heavy trimming tendencies, that’s ok. It’s not like “crepe murder” is a moral failing. It’s just unnecessary and sometimes unsightly. The fact that skipping it could save you decades of invoices and guys on ladders with sharp instruments, is just a bonus.
After all these years I’m glad my coworker pointed out the tragedy of errors that is the typical crepe myrtle trimming practice. Having seen how extraordinary they can be, I always look wistfully upon the few examples of crepes allowed to grow to their full potential in our area.
If you are thinking about planting a crepe myrtle in your yard, do a little research for the size and color you want. The right crepe myrtle has likely been sitting at a local nursery this whole time, patiently waiting for us all to figure it out. And if you want to enjoy the full glory of your trees, consider joining us in retirement from the “Crepe Murder Club.”
