Why do crape myrtles look so ugly after severe pruning?
Severe pruning, or crape murder, triggers a cycle of weak, leggy shoot growth that forces property owners to keep chopping the tree year after year. Once a tree is cut this way, it permanently alters its natural shape and locks you into endless maintenance just to keep it from looking diseased.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1trimming branches smaller than 1/2"
- 2letting trees grow naturally like a tree
- 3Hiring a landscape designer
- 4Reading gardening magazines for before-and-after inspiration
- 5Trimming existing trees and bushes instead of removing them entirely
- 6Replacing diseased boxwoods with alternative plants like inkberry
- 7Switching to online mode by unchecking download shared folders
- 8Using web access to open the mailbox separately
- 9Deleting empty folders and restructuring to reduce total folder count
- 10Migrating file storage workflows away from email to SharePoint
- 11Cutting the bush down to the root so it regrows from scratch.
- 12Leaving the evergreens unpruned or questioning whether to attempt cutting them back.
- 13major pruning
- 14patched the scar
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I hate crepe murder. I've got some beautiful 30 foot tall crepe Myrtle's.”source ↗
“Once you do it a few times you gotta keep doing it because your whole tree is leggy shoots”source ↗
“Once you chop them this way, that’s all you can do to them for the rest of their life.”source ↗
“Client has a shared mailbox in Exchange Online used for order administration, organised by region/country/customer/year. It had 12,394 folders. Since around Sept 8–9 the folder tree stops loading at roughly 976 subfolders in Outlook classic (cached mode).”source ↗
“Anyone else seeing shared mailbox folder trees truncate since last week's updates?”source ↗
“IL btw. These trees are ugly and diseased. I also hate the brick border and shrubs. Willing to spend $$ to make this look real nice.”source ↗
“Located around Raleigh NC and I have 3 evergreens that I planted to hide the HVAC components about 25 years ago. They are looking more like trees now and wondering if it's OK to trim them, how, to what extent & when.”source ↗
“Do i need to cut it down lower than needed and then have it look rubbish for a while til it grows in?”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to remove a large tree in a tight space between fences
- 2How to kill volunteer trees near a house without herbicides
- 3Why is my evergreen turning brown after winter?
- 4How to kill invasive vines without killing the trees?
- 4Can you cut overgrown shrubs below the window line without killing them?
- 6Overgrown nutsedge going to seed