Managing Crape Myrtles

Many people often ask when is the best time to prune your crepe myrtle. Well when you're looking at pruning shrubs there's something you need to find out first and that's whether the shrub blooms on old wood or new wood. Behind us here we have a plant that blooms on old wood. This is a forsythia and now a lot of our early springtime blooming shrubs do bloom on old wood and this like quince and some of your hydrangeas are examples of those shrubs that bloom on old wood. You can see here the flower buds were already developed last season and that's why they're ready to go first thing in the spring before any leaves start coming out. If we had pruned this before it bloomed we would be cutting off those flowers. The best time to prune a plant that blooms on old wood is right after it's done flowering. Now crepe myrtles they bloom on new wood. You can see here in late winter early spring that our crepe myrtle has not started coming out of dormancy yet. There are no flowers and no leaves unlike some of our spring blooming shrubs. This one blooms a little later in the season and as we stated it does bloom on new wood. So what it's actually going to do is start producing some new shoots and some new leaves before it develops those flower buds. Now for shrubs that bloom on new wood the best time to prune them is prior to their new growth. So right now is when we're going to take a look at this and start pruning it and anytime you prune anything you want to make sure that you remove any dead diseased or crossing and rubbing branches first. You can see here this crepe myrtle has quite a few stems coming up from the ground and we're going to take a look at some of those. We want to make sure that we maintain an open vase shaped canopy. They like a lot of good airflow and this will help reduce any disease or fungus that might come in here as well. Now here you can see a couple of branches that are crossing one another and they're actually rubbing and bruising each other on the sides of them. So we're going to go ahead and take one of those out. Now how do you determine which of the rubbing branches to remove? Well again looking at this we're going to remove the one that is growing more towards the center of the canopy. This one is growing outward and so that's the one that we're going to keep. We've got a nice sharp pair of loppers here and we're going to try to get down as low as possible on that stem and remove that branch. A lot of times you'll have some of these lower branches that have been removed earlier but you want to go ahead and take those down as much as possible too because that just creates dead wood that might harbor potential diseases and insects. Now on this same branch that you can see where it was rubbing we also have a dead stem here so we're just going to take our pruners and go ahead and cut that out. You'll see we also have another little stem here and this just is kind of going to be some weak growth. It's not really going to add anything. What we're looking for is a mature plant that's going to have these beautiful large stems and so this one we're going to go ahead and take out as well and you can see how that opens up the interior here a little bit more again allowing for good airflow. So we're just going to continue this around the plant again making sure that we are making the proper cuts. You don't ever want to step back and look and see that you've pruned one side too much and the other side is lopsided then. Now that we've pretty much finished pruning this one you can see how it's got a nice vase shape to it. It's got an open interior to allow for good airflow and you can see we took a little bit off but not too much. You never want to prune more than a third of the plant away and this way it still has plenty of vegetation once it starts coming out of dormancy to establish more growth. Now this is not a mature plant just yet so we'll need to continue to do this and of course if you ever see any suckers or small shoots starting to come from the roots you want to make sure to trim those back as well because we just want to maintain these trunks that are here now. Now behind us we have one more crape myrtle that's a little bit larger. You can see it's almost mature and how beautiful this bark is starting to establish itself. As they get bigger you're going to want to just to continue to prune these lower branches up so that you can keep that lifted and see the trunks below it. And the last thing a lot of people ask about are these dried seed heads that are from last season. Now if they do bother you because they will maintain there as the new growth is coming out and they tend to make it look a little bit dried and dead looking so what you can do is just get some leather gloves and easily strip them like that but there's no reason to really go through and prune anything. It's more of an aesthetic thing so here we have some that are much taller than what we can reach and you'd have to get on a ladder and so we're just going to leave them and the vegetation will soon cover those dried seeds over. Now if you're new to pruning I have to say crape myrtles are a pretty good plant to start practicing on. You probably have seen some that have been what we call crape murdered where they've just been cut off with a chainsaw and those knuckles start to develop and that's not the best way to prune a crape myrtle at all. In fact what you're doing is slowly killing that crape myrtle but as evident by some of the poor pruning jobs that are around you can see that it's pretty difficult to kill a crape myrtle and it's not going to happen anytime soon but really this is the best way to maintain that natural healthy crape myrtle shape. We hope you enjoyed this video. It's part of our Oklahoma Gardening YouTube channel. You can also find even more videos on our OK Gardening Classics YouTube channel and join us on social media for great gardening tips, photos, and discussion.