Southern gardeners are contemplating pruning their crapemyrtles right now.
Personally, I think whacking them into a knob is the ugliest thing you can do to this beautiful plant. It's simple to just remove twigs that are smaller than your little finger, prune out limbs that cross through the middle and clip the sprouts around the base. The result is a beautiful plant for both winter AND summer.
this is right
this is ugly
this is pitiful!
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I see this horrible idea of "pruning" crepe myrtles all the time and have no idea why on earth one would do that unless they are wrongly planted under utility wires. This method is known as "pollarding" and is usually done by folks who prune trees with absolutely no knowledge of tree trimming (typically sent out by the utility companies to wreak havoc on someone's trees to keep them from interfering with the utility lines). That practice weakens and eventually kills the trees. Crepe myrtles will do just fine if you let them grow the way they are designed to grow and just do general pruning of wayward branches not entire trunks. They are designed to grow multiple trunks anyway so leaving one main trunk is defeating the whole premise of planting one in the first place.
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I decided when the trees got too tall I would get professionals to do the pruning. It worked and they look beautiful. They even looked great AFTER pruning. Sometimes it is better to let a PRO do the job.
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