Take clipped (with permission) flowering specimens or good photos to garden centers and look for matches there.

If you only knew how useless your description is......

How about you tell us just what you're looking for in a crape myrtle, as well as your general location.

Oh well, looks like I'll just need to figure it out myself.

sweetbay, we don't mean to be unhelpful :-) It is just that there are dozens of red flowered crapes, some large and others small to dwarf. Your information is just not sufficient to give us much to go on.

You could narrow it down some by determining a size. Is this a full grown crape that is a small shrub or just a somewhat recent planting that has not yet matured to full size?

CMs have hundreds of named varieties ... i think.. lol ...

finding the name of any single one.. except the most common ones ... is probably very hard ...

when i run across this .. i think of two options ...

first is to propagate the one you have.. so you can come up with an exact duplicate ... the down side is.. it will take a number of years to grow it to a good size .. if in fact.. you can nurse it along that long ...

so the other option is to think about a group of 3 plants ... adding two other plants .. and making this one a stand alone example of such ... with the other two.. as supporting cast ...

with many plants.. every year.. they come out with the newer and the better ones ... and as such ... frankly.. not many peeps can tell them apart .. and once the new ones prove to be better.. no one grows the older for sale.. so even if you did find a name.. doesnt mean you will ever find it for sale ...

there is of course.. the final solution .. lol .. just get rid of it.. and buy a new one in spring.. that makes your toes tingle .... and then never lose the name ...

just maybe.. if you can get a pic.. of the flower.. and the whole plant.. someone here just might be able to GUESS its name ...

ken

OK, I'm sorry. I mistakenly thought the small size and deep red color might be enough to give people a few ideas. I will try to get a picture. If it's not blooming right now I will post a picture when it does.

I'm in central NC so crape myrtles meet their expected heights here. This one was planted about 5 years ago I think. (It's not mine. It belongs to a neighbor.) It's a rounded shrub about 3' high. The flowers are dark red, the closest to wine red I've ever seen in a crape myrtle. Like a dark cherry red. It's gorgeous.

You might want to ask the neighbor :-)) They may have picked the plant intentionally based on size and color and know/remember the variety.

hi sweetbay103, shown here is 'Pocomoke', it is over 15 years old and never been pruned. Pic was taken in September so it was finished blooming but it had red flowers earlier. Location, Virginia.

If planning to shop garden centers there it might work better to state what characters you are looking for anyway instead of asking by variety name in case nobody has the same exact kind but an acceptable - or perhaps even better - substitute is on the local market at this time. Even if you are instead going to be shopping web sites you could just see what the kinds they have are like and pick out one that has the desired features, with the naming of the neighbor's plant again not needing to be known in order to get one that fits the bill.

Remember, too, that small crape myrtles can grow, or a large plant can be pruned drastically by the owner so that a passerby will never know its natural size and form. This crape could easily be a species that normally grows to a hefty 30 feet tall, but is hacked down by the owner every year.....crapes bloom on new wood.

Of course, it could very possibly be a seedling, which would make it a no name crape.....there are about a billion of those around, each different from the others.

Also, color expression can actually change from year to year, or even from one year to the next. A few years ago, I kept noticing a street side row of gorgeous crapes with the most unusual flowers the color of grape juice or grape popsicles! I made a mental note to knock on some doors the next year for permission to gather a few cuttings.

Well, for the next five years, they weren't grapey but a deep cherry red, which I don't care for at all. This year? Grape juice purple again. Go figure.

Consider 'Baton Rouge', 'Chisam Fire', 'Cherry Dazzle', 'Creole', 'Houston', 'Sacramento', ... the list goes on.

Siren Red is not really a shrub, but more a small tree.

Why don't you take a few hardwood cuttings and propagate them, to be sure you end up with the exact same cultivar? It's the best time of the year to do such, and they're really easy to propagate.

Here's a picture:

Definitely rule out 'Pocomoke', the plant in OP's pic is much too open and lanky. OP revisit the deepest red thread.

Yes, not a dwarf ("small shrub"). A small-growing selection would have a habit like the one in the Virginia picture. Plant asked about resembles Dynamite ('Whit II'), which I have seen on the general market here in recent years.

Cherry red flowers in full sun and hot conditions

http://www.drcarlwhitcomb.com/Patented_Plants.html

It looks like my Dynamite that I planted last year and is blooming right now.

I can post pics of 'Dynamites' tomorrow for you to compare.

Logan, hardwood cuttings are those taken in the late fall-winter.

Thanks guys!

OK, so that's not a dwarf. LOL! That's just a young one.

Dave in NoVA: correct, this is a young full-sized tree/bush. I'm letting it become a bush rather than trimming it tree shape.

Page from web site (link, above) of Dynamite ('Whit II') originator C. Whitcomb says "Upright to 15'". So not much of a tree. And hence the shrubby habit shown in picture(s) on this thread.

Which is just what I want. When I bought it from the grower, I said I wanted a " bush" and she said they're all the same, just depends on how you prune them.

Which is false, of course. There are even truly dwarf cultivars that are quite small-growing.

"Logan, hardwood cuttings are those taken in the late fall-winter."

That's debatable. I start all of mine in the summer, and most of them are successful.

Logan, I'm pretty sure that you have no idea what you're talking about. The type of cutting....soft wood, semi hardwood, and hardwood has to do with the time of year in which cuttings are harvested and the degree of maturity of the tissue, not the degree of difficulty.

Hardwood cuttings are not summer cuttings.

It's your terminology that is wrong, not whether or not you should take cuttings in the summer.

Hardwood cuttings. Not semi-hardwood, not softwood. Actual branches, with bark, that could never, under any circumstance be flexible. Here are some I took a few weeks ago.

Here is a flower from this same crepe myrtle shown above, from last week (still flowering).

I'm pretty sure my terminology and methods are correct. So, have you ever propagated a hardwood cutting (of crepe myrtle, of course) ?

HERE is an interesting technique for preparing hardwood cuttings from roses. Like all hardwood cuttings they are prepared from dormant, leafless cutting material, in this case in February. Countless shrubs and some trees can be propagated from hardwood cuttings, its cheap, easy and no mist system required.

"Hardwood cuttings are taken from dormant, mature stems in late fall, winter, or early spring. Plants generally are fully dormant with no obvious signs of active growth. The wood is firm and does not bend easily. Hardwood cuttings are used most often for deciduous shrubs but can be used for many evergreens. Examples of plants propagated at the hardwood stage include forsythia, privet, fig, grape, and spirea."

If a cutting is made in August in North America, it is NOT a hardwood cutting.

He (Logan) doesn't get it. Now I'm starting to feel sorry for him.

Yes, Logan. I have propagated hardwood cuttings...many thousands of them. I had a busy wholesale nursery for several years; my employees and I spent every WINTER propagating a wide variety of shrubs, vines, groundcovers, and trees. It's not a flexibility issue at all.

We also did softwood and semi hardwood propagation at the appropriate times of year. The timing of asexual propagation is mostly dependent upon the needs of the plant. Some simply do best when cuttings are taken at a particular time of year.

Logan, I urge you to invest in yourself by seeking some formal education, finding a job at a successful nursery, asking for recommendations on good books, even searching the internet for educational resources.

Hmm on second thought I'm wonder if this is Dynamite. That crape myrtle was planted several years ago and has not been cut back. It could never get to 15'. I have about a half a dozen crape myrtles and they grow pretty fast.

These are four possible options I came up with before I started this thread:

Tightwad Red

Victor

Okmuglee

Petit Red Imp

And then I looked at the pictures on the internet and they were terrible.

Again all you really have to do is shop around for one that has the features you want, and not worry about the exact identification of the neighbor's plant.

There is a newer cultivar out now being sold by Lowe's and Home Depot. It is called "Garnet Queen" The color is very intense and deep. Dynamite is probably the one you saw.

Introducer's page on that one.

Emerald Empire® Crapemyrtle Garnet Queen™ PPAF

http://www.jberrynursery.com/store/Emerald-Empire®-Crapemyrtle-Garnet-Queen™-PPAF/F5213CF6-F1C1-4E15-8429-3C729A2BB09F?StoreTypeID=1063&CategoryId=134bab24-78c0-465a-8c35-b542d83f977a&SubCategoryId=63ca771b-7c03-46c0-b43c-2c7ea1ebb56c&catalogpgid=3f772b89-4b64-4341-be2d-d87ceec646be

It appears the cultivar name is 'BRS'.

New Plants 2017: J. Berry Nursery

https://www.amerinursery.com/plants/new-plants-2017-j-berry-nursery/