Texas Gardening: Gardening with Texas Native Plants and Wildflowers - Part 2, 1 by frostweed

frostweed wrote:
Well guys, I did figure out why my Texas Mountain Laurel didn't have much of a bloom this year. Since it had so may blooms last year and every one of them set seed, I was very thrilled because I had vissions of multiplying my shrub, so I let all the seed capsules remain.
Well what I have learned is that the bloom clusters start to develop on the tips of the branches in the summer of the current year, for the followinf spring, and since all the branches were ocupied with the seed capsules they were not able to develop blooms. So the moral of the story is, if your shrub has seed capsules all over, take off some, so you will have flowers next year. Here is a close up of this years cluster.