The Battle of the Crape Myrtle

Sounds like a war novel, huh? It WAS a war.

I hated this botanical bastard. I did not plant it. It came with my old house. “It’s just a tree,” you are thinking…“How hard can it be to remove?” This Crape Myrtle was unstoppable. It was an Energizer Bunny Bush on steroids. It was the Terminator of the tree world. It was like another season of “The Bachelor/Bachelorette.” It would NOT go away.

We first cut it down with a chainsaw. Then, we drilled hole in trunk and inserted tree-killer poison. We deprived it of sun and water. Like some alien monster whose severed parts regenerate into new beings, “suckers” (small offshoots) emerged. We sprayed “sucker stopper” on it to no avail. Yet the suckers continued to sprout and grow larger. Stronger. Mocking me.

So my head is hung in defeat. I surrendered. You won’t read about this war in a history book. Not even in a botany textbook. It was a war I fought valiantly and lost embarrassingly. A war in which I threw in my white sun hat (in lieu of the proverbial towel) in utter defeat. Ironically, the scientific classification for a crape myrtle is the genus “Lagerstroemia.” I say ironically because after all this, a beer sounded like a good idea.

And guess what…in my new house, there are two large crape myrtles welcoming you to my front door. And mocking me at the same time. I guess “if you can’t beat’em, join’em” applies to foliage too because like me, they’re staying.