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Love a good cornets kousa as much as the next person, but crape myrtles are pretty darn special. Crape myrtles last longer into the season vs a dogwood and folks in the south chop the crape myrtles without mercy and they keep blooming and blooming.
So I decide on a dogwood I got a 10-12 foot cornus rutdan celestial today and it has not fruit so the deck will stay clean. They planted it today and it is just lovely. Full of large white flowers, branching beginning chest high and at the moment mostly vertical which is perfect as it is 2 feet from a 6 foot fence. I look forward to its growth and spread. I love the horizonal branching of the dogwoods. I decided on the dogwood as the crape I was concerned with the clump stems being to tight near the fence. Thanks all for the input. I also couldn't resist some dwarf lilacs, I got three to place along the side of my garage.
Hooray for the Dogwood Team! While the bloom season is definitely shorter the branching habit, shade providing and fall color will make you be very happy with your choice.
BTW there are some lovely dwarf crape myrtles which look good in a bed.
I am partial to dogwoods. They bloom early in the season and provide lovely shade.
Crape Myrtles bloom in summer, drop their petals and do not provide shade like a dog wood.
dogwoods require no pruning and actually crape myrtles don't either. But many commit crape myrtle murder and god it looks awful. When I see them butchered like they are so frequently here in the south with knobs where they have been butchered every year I want to scream.
I agree! But I disagree about no pruning at all. I have 6 Tontos, about 12 years old. I always prune them up to around my height, taking off the small side branches from the main trunks each year, removing the branches that were thinner than my pinky finger. They have grown into beautiful, graceful trees with nice lines. And these days I mostly remove suckers, and all new growth/branches that are below eye level. There is less of that every year, and my pruning is really just a few minutes a year now.
I just cut down two Crape Myrtles that were planted too close to my house. They have been a nightmare for the last fifteen years. They attract Japanese beetles in the summer, they create a gazillion seed pods at the end of summer (weighing the limbs down), they release a gazillion seeds in the fall/winter (clogging the rain gutters), they drop the spent seed pods in the winter, they create a HUGE solid root ball, they send out new shoots from the roots after you cut down the main trunks, the stumps are incredibly difficult to kill...
Other than those few complaints they are fine .
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