I love crape myrtles...nice job getting it to flower within the confines of your design!
John

Thank you John.

It's not easy to guess when to prune back hard. The major problem is how to keep the leaves from getting burned up on the ends. The solution to which still eludes me. Got any suggestions? Besides moving to a cooler climate.

Are you growing any at this time? If so how about a post?

James

Good job on getting it to flower. I am still playing around with one trying to figure out a date for the last hard pruning and still get flowering in the same year. Have done hard prune in fall, and left it alone, and got nice flowers in late July-early August, but it sure looks top heavy.
This year I pruned back quite a bit on June 1, and still no flowering, so guess that was too late. May try mid May next year.
Thanks for the photos.
Jim Rieden Brookside Bonsai Society, Maryland

Jim

You will have to adapt the approach to the northern hemisphere but I have been teaching this successful approach for several years.

Pruning commences as soon as the leaves open. Allow the new shoots to extend to 3 pairs of leaves, then cut back to a single pair of leaves. Repeat this process until the last day of Spring. Stop pruning immediately as flowering buds commence developing at this time.

After flowering is finished remove all flowering shoots back to the leaves. In Autumn only prune those shoots that you do not want. Repeat the process each year, not only will you get flowers but ramification will also increase.

NB This will only produce flowers on wood that has matured.

good luck
dennis Mc