Landscaping Made Easy, Part 5: Crape Myrtle (Unmurdered)

Randy Lemmon calls it the "Annual Crape Myrtle Massacre".  A researcher at Stephen F. Austin University trumpeted the alarm with a manifesto titled "Stop The Crape Murder!"  Both of these gentlemen were referring to the "knuckling" of Crape Myrtles, the slash-and-hack procedure about which SFA's Grant says, "This practice may look appropriate behind a chain link fence in a Mississippi trailer park, but I can assure you it is not appropriate for any landscape that you intend to be admired."

It happens everywhere, for reasons nobody really knows, other than mindless tradition.  If you drive north on Calder Road right now, you can see some real beauties there on the left side of the road, bearing the scars of overzealous butchery. 

As with Yaupon Hollies, Crape Myrtles are ubiquitous in Houston.  I prefer to use native plants as much as possible and Crapes are not native (they come from China), but their attractiveness, count-on-'em flowers, and un-killable nature prompted me to include just one specimen in our landscaping design, as an accent. 

And not just any Crape Myrtle - a white five-trunk beauty intended to break up the visual monotony of our Wax Myrtle hedge.

This was one of the few trees for which I'd taken a pic of the installation procedure.  Notice I've made the receiving hole wider than the root ball.  Randy Lemmon suggests that you do this kind of thing and mix a bit of pea gravel in with the soil used for backfilling the wider hole.  That gives the roots a bit of a running start on penetrating the surrounding area.  Our soils are very clay-rich, hard, and difficult to penetrate.

I also throw a handful of MICROLIFE into the bottom of every new hole I dig.  It's a can't-go-wrong type of mild organic fertilizer that was developed specifically for use on the Texas Gulf Coast. 

Here's what it looked like in its first leafing season.  Still needed to straighten itself up.

I actually bought this Crape Myrtle from a source I haven't mentioned previously: Bradshaw's Nursery in Alvin.  It's very easy to get to from Centerpointe - just go south on FM 646, turn right on FM 517, travel a vew miles, and you'll see it on the left.  About 15 minutes for the trip. 

I don't fully understand Bradshaw's actual relationship to the outside world.  They are quite clear on their homepage that they are a wholesale nursery, which is one of the reasons I don't go there very often.  They had the best Crapes I found anywhere, however, so I picked that one up there.  I paid a price that was reasonable (about $130 for this thirteen-foot specimen that I hauled home in the back of my trusty minivan) and on par with end-of-season sale prices at Houston Garden Center, but a far nicer specimen than what HGC had at the time.

Screengrab from googlemaps.

In our eastern "sister subdivision" Oaks of Clear Creek, there is a street named "Bradshaw Nursery", and I don't know why that is, either, given that the nursery is in another city.  Sometimes developers sell road names, often with the financial proceeds donated to charity, so that might have been the source of it.  Perhaps one of our local League City mavens will chime in with a blog comment explaining the connection.

But back to the issue of Crape Murder.  If you wisely choose not to "knuckle" your Crape Myrtles, that doesn't mean that you have to let them go wild and unshapely.  I've been trimming our five-trunker to be faintly reminiscent of a Baobab tree:

From Wikipedia, an example growing in Madagascar.  These are funky but elegant looking trees.

That's the Crape in the middle, as it looked last week, but upon studying this photo, I realized that both it and its Wax Myrtle companions were getting a bit scruffy and impinging on each other, so...

...they all got a haircut this past weekend. You can see that the Wax Myrtles in particular look a lot more groomed now.

This is a white Crape Myrtle because I do believe that the pink flowering varieties are over-used in landscaping, and also because the folks at Bradshaw's swore that white Crape Myrtles are the fastest growers.  We have blues and purples accenting our landscaping (more about that later) and I also did not want to detract from the overall color scheme by adding any pink.  As this one continues to grow and fill out its multi-trunk, I'll trim it gently to make it look increasingly like the canopy-style Baobab in the Wiki photo above.  It is beginning to cascade over the tops of the Wax Myrtles, which adds another layer of visual interest.

So there you have yet another landscape contender, plus a bit of a local history mystery connected to its vendor.
:-)

Nothing like an un-slaughtered Crape silhouetted against a glorious winter sunset.  Where would the photo contrast come from if I had instead chopped off all those branches??
:-)