Weekend Gardener: Crepe myrtle maintenance to address winter damage
COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – Some crepe myrtles are showing damage from a freeze last winter but simple maintenance can help them look great again.
“I believe it was December 23,” said Tim Hartmann with Texas A&M AgriLife. “We got really cold…it wasn’t a really hard freeze, but the problem was we were so warm prior to that, and so it was kind of a sucker punch to some plants.”
Hartmann said that damage is showing on some of these plants across the area.
“We see, especially in the medians along Texas, where these trees have been actually frozen down to the ground. This one is partially frozen. It may or may not make it,” he said, pointing to a plant at the Leach Gardens in College Station. “But you’ll notice we have all this growth coming out from the base and so it looks beautiful.”
He said you do not need to replace the plant.
“Notice we have all the sucker growth and you may be tempted to make one trunk out of this. But remember, crepe myrtles are really pretty as a multi-trunk tree. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go with some of these stronger chutes. You can kind of tie them together so that they kind of are, more or less upright. Let those go and then we’re gonna go in all this other growth here. We’re gonna cut it out as close to the ground as possible. So we’ve got our new trunks right here, and notice there are already flowers flowering. So we can come in and we can completely grow this tree back. We don’t have to replace it.”
Watch the video in the player above to see how Hartmann does the maintenance on the crepe myrtle.
