Tasty Crepes

These compact trees are stuffed with colour, their big flowerheads covering the plants through the warmest months.

 

When you're looking for rich spicy autumn colour too, your can't go past crepe myrtles.
The deciduous green-leaved varieties transform into a glowing firework of orange, red, copper, and maroon before their leaves fall for winter.

 

And when you're looking for year-round colour, you can't go past crepe myrtles either!
Green-leaf crepe myrtles have beautiful bark, smooth and gently shaded in soft earth tones of ochre, stone, sand.

The new dark-leaved varieties keep their foliage right through winter in subtropical climates, giving you a dramatic dark backdrop to your winter-flowering shrubs and bulbs.

 

You'd think that something so showy and tropical looking and full of flower would need really warm temperatures all year round.

But crepe myrtles are frost hardy, the roots sometimes surviving temperatures of -20C, even if all the above-ground growth succumbs to the cold.

Crepe myrtles are very resilient to high humidity, but what they really need is lots of strong summer heat to ripen the woody stems and keep the plant going through winter.

That's why it's the ideal plant for almost everywhere in Australia, as the cold and hot and humid extremes hold no fear for a crepe!

If you're in Tasmania, or exposed on the snowfields and ranges, plant your crepe myrtles in a sheltered spot to maximise summer warmth.
They make a really good wall shrub as they are happy to be pruned, and we've seen them grown as hedges too.

In fact, while they are a tree when left to their own devices, hard pruning them each year turns them into an exuberant vigorous shrub and provides you with even bigger flowers.

Purists may frown on this hard pruning, as crepe myrtles need zero pruning at all apart from removing dead wood - but we chop back our plants each year in the nursery with no ill effects.

This our nursery Natchez which gets an annual haircut to provide us with cutting material.

Crepe myrtles are a big hit with beneficial pollinators - our nursery plants are buzzing with bees of all kinds right through the warmer months.

The seedpods that appear when the flowers fade also provide a tasty snack for local birds and seed-eating mammals (as well as being ornamental!) The start off like green peas and ripen to dark brown, when they pop open.

Coloured varieties won't come true from seed - all ours are grown from cuttings - so if you don't want seedlings, deadhead your crepes when the flowers die or the seedpods are still green.

The named varieties of green-leaved crepe myrtles that we grow are hybrids of Lagerstroemia indica and Lagerstromeia faurieri, developed at the US National Arboretum.

The indica parent gives them big bright showy flowers, and the faurieri parent provides extra resilience against pests and diseases.
These varieties are all named after native American first nations tribes : Acoma, Hopi, Lipan, Miami, Natchez, Yuma.

Acoma, Natchez

Acoma and Natchez are our two all-white green-leaved crepe myrtles.

Acoma is slightly smaller than Natchez; both are pest and disease resistant, with lush deep green leaves.

We grow Natchez in our nursery driveway, so if you've been to pick up your plants you may have seen it flowering, or ablaze with leaf colour in autumn.

One bush we coppice - cut very low to the ground; and the other we prune hard but leaving a short trunk. The new growth is vigorous in all directions, and the flowers much larger and abundant as a result.

Grown as a tree, they have a gently weeping habit, and wide branches, for maximum colour and shade.

Yuma

Our palest pink coloured crepe myrtle is Yuma, a cool blue-toned pink-lilac.
Yuma blends beautifully with blue and white flowers in a mixed border.

Always popular, and with unbelievably huge flowers even on young plants of two or three years old. In fact sometimes the flowers on young crepe myrtles are SO big, the stems need a little help to hold them up!

Lipan

Beautiful Lipan is always a popular variety as the pink tone harmonises so well with many other garden flowering plants.

In shade Lipan looks cool-toned, matching with blues and lilacs; in sun it takes on a warmer hue to complement oranges and golds.

It's a neat compact size when full-grown, ideal for even the smallest of back yards.

Hopi

Vibrant musk-stick-pink Hopi gives your garden a tropical exotic feeling, even if you get winter cold.

Maybe that's the reason it's our most popular coloured crepe myrtle!

Those long stems shoot up to the blue sky, filling the space with huge clouds of lolly pink flowers.

It's a slightly lighter warmer pink than Miami, and the colour changes with the sunlight. Crepes are magical like that!

Miami

Bubblegum-bright like Hopi, a little darker in tone, is Miami. And like Hopi, it's a colour chameleon!
In full sunshine the huge flower clusters look almost coral pink, like in the photo here; and on an overcast day the tone shades gently towards rich plum-magenta.

The changing colour of crepe myrtles is a charming quality of this flowering family.

This magic trick of the light is one of the reasons we add so many photos to our website, so you can see what the plants look like under all kinds of conditions.

In recent years, new varieties of dark-leaved crepe myrtles have been developed, which hold their colour and foliage right through the year in mild climates.

The leaves range from vibrant maroon to almost-black in tone, and provide a dramatic backdrop to the big bright bold flowers.

We have varieties from our partners at Ozbreed, and from Touch of Class plants, that grow to a range of mature sizes.

Grande Red

The biggest and blackest of all the dark-leaved crepe myrtles we stock, Grande Red is a bold bright four-metre statement of a plant, a shout-from-the-rooftops plant, a dare-you-to-miss-me plant!

It's a full-on extrovert, from its dark maroon-black leaves to its giant vermilion-red flower clusters like a flamenco dancer's skirt.

One solo plant is an attention-grabbing feature all of its own; we have a hedge of it at the nursery and it's unmissable. Plant one yourself and get the neighbours talking.

Slender Black

All the intensity of Grande Red in a super-slim package, new Slender Black is on its way to being one of our in-demand flowering shrubs.

Super-dark foliage all year round, vibrant showy flowers somewhere between coral-red and lolly pink, and a ridiculously skinny profile (less than a metre across) that makes it the perfect plant for squeezing in a hedge where there doesn't look like there's room enough to grow one.

There's always room for a Slender Black!

Canopy

Ozbreed's dark-leaved Canopy will give your garden the most gorgeous colourful privacy hedging, with wide-spreading plum-purple branches of foliage that can reach 3m across.

And in summer, massive heads of flowers that shift from magenta pink to warm coral in the sunlight like an 80s pH colour-changing lipstick.

Purely Purple

Tropically exotic, Diamonds in the Dark™'s Purely Purple not only gives you jazzily bright midsummer flowers, it pairs them with intensely dark, almost black foliage for maximum contrast.

Definitely a showstopper, and compact enough for most suburban back yards to find a space for one.
On second thoughts, plant it in the front garden and make the neighbours jealous!

 

We hope this has convinced you to find a spot for a crepe myrtle in your garden - they really do have something beautiful to look at, every month of the year.