It’s the middle of winter and all your neighbors are bored with no work to do in their Gainesville Lawn. So, they all decide to go start trimming their crepe myrtles back to the knuckles. Before you do that, I wanted to send you a tip about trimming your trees.
Here it is…Don’t do it. Or if you really feel the need, do it correctly. The best way to trim your crepe myrtles is to treat them like your large trees by trimming them very little. You wouldn’t consider topping your oak tree at 20’, yet this time of year when you look down your block, most of your neighbors are whacking off their crepe myrtles at about 6’ tall and telling you they’re going to bloom better. A few years ago I watched someone using a circular saw proudly cutting through limbs 3” thick. This is not something you want to do to your Gainesville Landscape.
Your neighbors are creating big, ugly knots on the trunks of their crepe myrtles and the few extra blooms your neighbors are getting will be on the end of thin, spindly limbs too weak to support the weight of the blooms, making the limbs droop.
How should you trim a crepe myrtle? Trim off limbs rubbing against each other or rubbing your roof. You can also trim off the seed pods back to where the branch is no longer flexible too, but try not to trim off anything larger than a pencil. Want to see what good pruning looks like? See the photo above.
In our business the yearly sawing that your neighbors are doing isn’t called “pruning”, it’s called “crepe murder” and the punishment is a really ugly tree.
