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All you want is the perfect, well-behaved, unique tree for that
small area or corner of the
house. You also demand great summer color when little else
highlights the landscape.

Do you lower your expectations or go with a plastic tree? You
don’t have to do either. You
can use a hardy, tough, small tree that has great colors of your
choice — as long as your choice
is lavender, pink or white. You even get to choose the height.

Crape myrtles are an effective component of all the landscapes
that represent both the new and
the traditional South. A common nonnative small tree or large
shrub (Lagerstroemia genus),
crape myrtle has showy summer flowers. It’s easy to propagate,
easy to grow and fairly easy
to find at nursery outlets.

From China and Southeast Asia, crape myrtles were first recorded
planted in Europe in 1759.
Since then, people have planted them extensively across the
Southeastern United States, the
Caribbean, California and Hawaii.

Landscapers are increasingly using crape myrtles as small trees.
Pruning the young trees into a
single-stem tree form is easy.

The tree-form crape myrtle has great bark features that most
people never get to see. And once
you prune them into tree form, crape myrtles are easy to
maintain. Single-stemmed crape
myrtles can also be classically pollarded, or maintained in a
small-tree form by regular
pruning.

Fitting small trees in small spots and under tall objects is
filled with problems. The small trees
always seem to grow larger than expected. But with crape
myrtles, many newly designed
cultivars top out at a specific height. You can pick the flower
color and the tree height in one
choice.

Here are a number of crape myrtle cultivars and their flower
color. These National Arboretum
selections will respond well to pruning into a tree form and are
resistant to foliage mildew.

This is not a complete list. Check availability, color choices
and other cultivars. On all
cultivars, you’ll have to train branches early and prune out
stems to get the beautiful
single-stem look.

Crape myrtles that grow about 15 feet high include Apalachee
(light lavender), Comanche
(dark pink), Lipan (lavender), Osage (clear pink), Sioux (pink),
Tuscarora (dark pink),
Tuskegee (dark pine) and Yuma (lavender).

Cultivars that reach about 20 feet high include Miami (dark
pink), Potomac (clear pink) and
Wichita (lavender).

And crape myrtles that grow to 25 feet tall include Biloxi (pale
pink), Muskogee (light
lavender), and Natchez (white).

If your view of crape myrtles is a multistem, hack-trimmed
shrub, expand your mind and
landscape options. Small trees are great and easy, if trained
correctly.