Texas Gardening: How not to trim a crape myrtle, 0 by texasflora_com

texasflora_com wrote:
A "fist" is defnitely a good way of describing it. I sure find it ugly and unnatural, but I'm sure there are many it doesn't bother at all. I guess many people just think of it as a hedge and they think they must shear off the top. I don't follow any garden books and just use common sense. A book is the opinion of the author who wrote it. A crape myrtle's natural shape is a multi-trunked tree. I've seen very few that were trained to a single trunk and I can imagine this would be quite a problem for a crape myrtle since it's inclined to form multi trunks. I've observed that crapes can have good years and bad years as far as blooms. It takes diligence to keep the suckers trimmed at the base but I've found that more mature ones with multiple trunks sucker somewhat less. Regardless of which way people go with their crapes, it's natural form is a tree and as in topping trees, it opens the plant up to disease and insects by making those drastic mutilations. I highly doubt those landscape contractors at Wal-Mart even know the names of the plants they are cutting.

Here's what they do every year to the crapes at the nice little Dr. Pepper park in the center of downtown Dublin.