1 of 2
Crapemyrtle
Properly pruning your crapemyrtle at the appropriate time of year will help ensure a beautiful springtime blossom.
2 of 2
Poorly pruned crapemyrtle
Topping all the branches of a crapemyrtle is unhealthy and can cause problems in the long run.
During a recent call-in segment on Clemson University’s “Your Day” radio program, a listener delighted me with this question: “I’ve been pruning my crapemyrtles the way everyone else does, but I want to do something different. I want them to grow tall. Can you advise me?”
After years of butchering his Natchez crapemyrtles into 6-foot-high hat racks, the caller wanted his trees to attain their full height potential (20 to 25 feet) with big, flowering canopies.
Crapemyrtles produce flowers only on the current season’s growth, so this is the time of year to prune them to ensure colorful, healthy canopies in the spring and summer. Unfortunately, many well-meaning people take a hatchet-job approach to pruning, making their trees look like fence posts. Horticulturists call this “crapemurder” because it disfigures the trees and exposes them to disease.
Of course, the other extreme is to do nothing and end up with a witches’ brew of tangled shoots and stems that bear few, if any, flower.
I thanked the caller for his refreshing “let ’em grow” attitude and outlined these steps to prune crapemyrtles into natural-looking trees.
(1) Remove any broken, dead and diseased limbs. Then step back and look at the tree. Imagine a vase-shaped canopy of upward-arching branches growing from its center. Visualize the long, thick limbs bearing 6- to 12-inch long clusters of flowers in the summer.
(2) With a sharp pair of loppers or pruning shears, start at the bottom and work up. Remove any suckers sprouting from the base of your crapemyrtle, and thin out any side branches from the lower third of the trunk. Thinning refers to the removal of entire shoots or limbs back to their branch points—the point of attachment to the trunk or limb.
(3) Now work your way to the top. Keep that image of a healthy canopy in mind as you prune, and think about building a framework to support it. If you’ve committed crapemurder in the past, you removed the tree’s structure and created bunches of spindly shoots emerging from nooks and crannies around and below the cuts. Keep a few of the thick, well-attached, outward-growing shoots and remove the rest.
(4) Finally, head-back or tip-prune any wayward or unbranched limbs.
At the end of the process, your pruned crapemyrtle should appear tree-like instead of like a sawed-off broom handle. When the tree starts leafing out in the spring and early summer, come back a few times to fine-tune its framework. Pinch out any green shoots growing in the wrong direction and thin but any shoots you missed earlier. By mid-summer, your crapemyrtle should be in fine form.
For even more detailed instructions on proper crapemyrtle pruning, visit the Clemson Extension Home & Garden Information Center website. You—and your crapemyrtles—will be glad you did.
Bob Polomski, Ph.D., is a horticulturist and ISA-certified arborist with Clemson University, and a frequent host on “Your Day,” a radio magazine produced as a public service of Clemson University Radio Productions. The program airs Monday through Thursday from noon to 1 p.m. on the South Carolina ETV Radio Network. For details, visit yourday.clemson.edu.