Remove any damaged or dead trunks at ground level. The new sprouts will replace the old damaged trunks. This is no problem what so ever for a crape myrtle. If it were me, I'd limit the number of new trunks to somewhere between 3 and 5, but that's somewhat a matter of personal taste. You don't have a thing to worry about except who the culprit was that stepped on your tree.

Thanks for the response. So if I'm understanding correctly, go ahead and remove the 2 limbs I have now, cut them back to the ground? From there let these 3 or 5 suckers (I said shooter above but meant sucker) continue to grow?

Yes, the damaged/dead trunks won't help the tree, and crapes
pretty much always regrow very successfully from such treatment.

Mark-

How did you load pictures with your post? I just posted a question about my crepe myrtle, but I couldn't figure out how to attach pictures. I ended up posting a link to my kodak gallery account so it could be viewed.

Thanks! And good luck with your CM!

Angela

i use imageshack but you need to use html code on this forum; that site provided the code and i just copy and past it into my message.

does it look like it is planted a bit deep in the first pics???

and would a CM care ...

ken

Angmoyer,

One of the easiest ways to provide your photo to be embedded into a post is to upload it onto an image hosting site such as Photobucket, Flickr, etc. That should be pretty straight forward, and the individual sites will give instructions on how to get your photos uploaded to their site when you sign up.

Once your picture has been uploaded, find its web address by right clicking on the image and copying the image location. Some sites may even provide your image's address in a text box below the photo for your convenience.

Let's say, as an example, that the address of the picture you want to post is http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg

To embed the picture into a post, use the command:
img src="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg">;

If your picture is too large to fit nicely into the text page, you can add a width attribute. The command with the width attribute would looks something like:
img src="http://somepicturesite.com/yourpicture.jpg"; width=600>

Note that I had to use special characters to get the commands above to show up here without turning into pictures, but you can use them as shown (with the correct image web address, of course).

And, BTW, you'll probably have better luck finding info on crape myrtles (Google searches, etc) if you spell crape with an a instead of an e. Almost all botanical gardens, university websites, and the Crape Myrtle Society spell it with an a.