This is a pretty crape myrtle. It blooms pretty well in the Portland, Oregon area. (keep in mind, though, that in PNW, crape myrtles bl...Read Moreoom much less readily than in the south. In my area, smaller ones tend to bloom late in the summer. As they get bigger, they bloom easier- for example, my larger Natchez which bloomed in June (and still has a few flowers left now in September).
The reason I only give the Midnight Magics a neutral is that they have had a couple problems. One is they have grown quite gangly rather than bushy. This probably isn't due to the variety of CM but rather such things as soil quality in the spot I have them in. Also, they probably were starved for water until this summer, because I had grass growing under them until last fall at which point I killed the grass with Roundup. They look bushier this year, which I think may be due them being better watered by the fact that when I water them they now get all the water instead of the grass sucking up a lot of the water.
The other problem I have had with them is powdery mildew. They have had a lot more problems with that than my other crape myrtles. However, it may not be the variety of crape myrtle, it may just be environmental factors. In the case of the midnight magics, I have them in three rows with 12 of them altogether, and it could be that having that many all in one place provides an environment that is more conducive to the spread of powdery mildew. It is a fairly dry part of my yard, so I don't believe the problem is caused by being in a wet place.
All in all, this is a nice plant and I hope I can keep the powdery mildew under control enough to keep these and not have to replace them with some other variety of plant. I used some Spectracide fungicide on them early in the summer and that definitely helped. It pretty completely eliminated the powdery mildew through most of the summer, although I noticed some that has shown up again in early September. That could be caused by the fact we had some rain. At first it looked like the Spectracide was possibly curbing foliage growth a bit but the Midnight Magics grew a whole lot of foliage over the course of the summer, so they seem to be able to handle the fungicide OK.
This is a pretty crape myrtle. It blooms pretty well in the Portland, Oregon area. (keep in mind, though, that in PNW, crape myrtles bl...Read More