In the Army, you never stay anywhere very long.  You receive orders, perhaps move to a post and are assigned to quarters.  And, that is your “temporary home.”  Sorry Carrie.  You might plant flowers.  But as for trees or shrubs, what’s there is what you get.

Our first permanent assignment (which means more than six months) was Fort Hood, Texas.  After waiting almost a year, we were assigned to quarters on Newton Court, right across from the Officers Club.  After spending three years in law school in a cramped apartment, this house seemed enormous.  The dining room was large enough to play ping pong.  We didn’t have any dining room furniture, so we bought a ping pong table.

The yard had lots of vegetation.  The back border of our yard consisted of pomegranate bushes – ten to twelve.  The fruit was so bitter that you couldn’t eat it.  But, at the left front corner of the house was a kumquat tree.   The fruit from that tree tasted like nectar for the gods.  I would lose myself under that tree, picking, peeling and devouring the precious fruit.  The next and last year in those quarters resulted in no fruit.  A late frost wiped out the buds.  I have bought kumquats, but they never tasted as sweet as the ones hanging from that tree.

In 1990, I retired from the Army and we bought a not-so-temporary home.  We have lived in it for the last twenty years.  At the corner where the driveway meets the sidewalk to our front door, we have a crepe myrtle tree.  The first thing we noticed was that the pinkish red blooms were enormous.  Some were almost as large as a soccer ball.  We looked around the neighborhood and found that there were bigger crepe myrtles.  There were also more robust crepe myrtles, but none had blooms as large as ours.  We hoped this would not lead to bloom envy.

Our pride was dashed with the first good thunderstorm.  Many of the branches were broken and most of the rest of the tree was practically on the ground.  As soon as it stopped raining, I rushed out and cut off the broken branches and shook the other blooms to remove the weight of the water.  I ended up with petals all over me.  Next, I tied up the remaining branches like they were public enemy # 1.   This kept the tree upright, but with the next storm, many of the branches snapped.

The tree became an obsession of ours.  Rope, rope and more rope.  Carole observed that Fort Myer had a large number of crepe myrtles and each winter they would cut them off at about two feet.  So we did that for a few years.  Each year the tree grew about the same height, with the same enormous blooms and the same wet weather results.  I bought more rope.

One year, we had an extremely severe winter and lost some shrubs.  I thought the crepe myrtle was toast.  Crepe myrtles get started late in the spring.  I didn’t realize that and since everything else was green, I figured our crepe myrtle had croaked.  I cut it all the way to the ground.  I am telling you it did not look alive.

By June, it was shooting out of the ground like a weed.  It wasn’t quite as tall as previous years, but it still had its beautiful over sized blooms.  I had to use a lighter weight rope that year.

About three years ago, Carole came up with an article in Southern Living entitled, “Stop! Don’t Chop!”  It gave a blow by blow accounting of how to cut and shape your crepe myrtle.  The article gave credit to a brochure from the Spartanburg Men’s Garden Club.  You probably were wondering what the Spartanburg men were doing when it wasn’t NASCAR season.  Well, they are trimming their crepe myrtles.

Anyway,  I’m into my third season of following their advice.  But I still had to deal with these gynormous blooms.  As things will happen, all the stars lined up a year ago.  Just as the blooms were at their peak (and before a storm),  we were having stone edging  placed around the house.  Tom Hardy, our landscaper, looked at the crepe myrtle and said, “You know, you need to remove some of those blooms off of the branches or you will have trouble when it rains.”   Duh!

He pointed at a branch with three large blooms and said I should cut off one or two.  There it was, the answer I had never considered.  It never crossed my feeble mind to whack off some of the blooms.  It was truly hard to do, at first.  But, it worked.  I may have had one branch snap last year, but that is real progress.

I actually put on my calendar for the first of February to trim the crepe myrtle.  Well, it is still waiting to be trimmed.  I couldn’t get to it in February because of the damn snow.  There is still time.