Looking to fill out your Texas landscape? Consider these summer blooming beauties

Our second son is about to turn 48. I was working for Texas A&M and the Extension Service when he was born. It was a good income with good benefits, but I felt the need to supplement things by growing nursery stock on our driveway in Farmers Branch. After all, I’d gotten two college degrees aiming me at becoming a world-class nursery producer. Surely I’d eventually get around to that.

Well, the plan of owning my own nursery kind of went by the boards once I started writing for the Star Telegram and working in radio, but my love for those plants I’d been growing has never waned.

The plants I’d been growing were dwarf crape myrtles — the Petite series. I had bought what nurseries call “liners.” They were 31/2-inch pots that I immediately shifted up into 1-gallon pots. I sold the 300 plants less than a year later and put that money toward Todd’s birth (great investment).

Out of that experience I really learned to appreciate those little crape myrtles. They had been patented and introduced by the very large wholesaler Monrovia Nursery in California in 1961. Side note: According to the United States National Arboretum, they were actually hybridized by Otto Spring from Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Monrovia bought the rights to them and put a big push on them. I remember poring over them in the Monrovia catalog as a teenager in College Station.

The Petite series includes varieties Petite Red Improved, Petite Embers (rose-red), Petite Plum (purple), Petite Orchid (dark orchid), Petite Pinkie and Petite Snow. They all grow to mature heights and widths of 42 to 48 inches with small leaves on densely branching plants. Like most crape myrtles, they start blooming by early June and it’s not uncommon for them to have three or four flushes of flowers by the time they shut up shop in mid-September. There aren’t many flowering shrubs that give you that much show per square foot.

So, that was the early 1960s when those came into the marketplace. I graduated from high school and started college at Texas A&M. As a junior I transferred to Ohio State to finish my undergraduate and Masters degrees. In that Masters degree research I was working alongside another horticulturist by the name of Michael Dirr.

Mike was (and still is) a brilliant plant man of international fame. He went on to get his PhD in plant physiology and ended up as the top person at the University of Georgia Arboretum.

Dirr, a native of the northern U.S., developed a fondness for crape myrtles once he moved to the South. His breeding work led to the introduction of another major group of dwarf varieties known as the Razzle Dazzle series. Four are quite popular in the nursery trade: Cherry Dazzle, Dazzle Me Pink, Berry Dazzle (fuchsia color) and Diamond Dazzle (white).

The Dazzle crape myrtles grow to mature heights and widths of 4 to 5 feet. As with all crape myrtles, they require full or nearly full sun. They do best when given highly organic soils and when kept moist at all times. They should be fertilized as their new leaves are emerging in late March or April, again in mid-May and again after the first round of blooms. They bloom on new growth so you’ll want to use the same type of fertilizer you would apply to your turfgrass, making sure that it has no weedkiller included.

There are other dwarf crape myrtles in the marketplace and I’m sure all would be well suited to North Central Texas. However, I do not recommend the “miniature, weeping” selections with the names reminiscent of Southern Louisiana (Lafayette, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Delta Blush, etc.) for use in landscape plantings north of the Gulf Coast. These are marketed as growing only to 18 to 24 inches tall and 24 to 30 inches wide. They develop mounding habits of growth. They’re great in patio pots and hanging baskets, but my experiences growing them in the ground in the Metroplex has been that they’re not able to survive even average North Texas winters.

There is one particular place that dwarf crape myrtles offer incredible help, and that is as a replacement for Knock Out® roses that have succumbed to the incurable (at least for now) rose rosette virus. That disease has so ravaged rose plantings that people have become very discouraged. There will eventually be a work-around found, but we’re not there yet with roses. In the meantime, dwarf crape myrtles can come to the rescue.

It took me several years to firm up that recommendation, but when I saw a bed of dwarf crape myrtles blooming for the second time one July, I realized they would be a great substitute. Here was my reasoning:

▪ Both plants bloom for several months. Roses are spring and fall, while crape myrtles are several times over the course of the summer.

▪ Crape myrtles are deciduous. Roses are almost so. That means that you wouldn’t want to grow either plant directly against the front of your house. They need to be planted in front of an evergreen shrub so they can “disappear” when they’re dormant.

▪ They both come in a variety of colors. Granted, you won’t get yellow or orange crape myrtles, but you’ll get over it.

▪ Admitted, roses are fragrant, but crape myrtles don’t get rose rosette virus (or black spot). Crape myrtles attract aphids (so do roses). These dwarfs rarely attract crape myrtle bark scale.

▪ Crape myrtles are even more tolerant of hot, dry weather than roses.

Isn’t it time you carved out a spot for these little beauties!

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 p.m. and on WBAP 820AM Sunday mornings 8-10 a.m. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.

This story was originally published July 8, 2022 at 5:30 AM.