Crape Myrtle

The crape myrtle, genus Lagerstroemia of the loosestrife family, is a deciduous tree or large shrub of the Indian subcontinent, southern China, southeast Asia and Australia; Lagerstroemia indica, despite the epithet, was brought into western gardens from Chinese cultivation. It has nothing to do with the true myrtle. Two features account for its standing as an ornamental. The first is the flower: long summer panicles of six or seven petals so thin and puckered that they were likened to crepe, borne over months rather than weeks. The second is the bark, which sheds in thin plates each year to leave a smooth, mottled, sinuous trunk, cool to the touch, so that the tree is as much admired in winter as in flower. In China it is the ziwei tree, and in Japan the sarusuberi, the name meaning that even a monkey would slip on so smooth a trunk.

Modern crape myrtle breeding owes much to a single twentieth-century program: the American botanist Donald Egolf at the United States National Arboretum crossed the common crape myrtle with the hardier, mildew-resistant Lagerstroemia fauriei from Japan starting in the 1950s, producing dozens of disease-resistant hybrid cultivars, many named for Native American tribes, that now dominate crape myrtle planting across the southern United States, a recent and well-documented piece of ornamental plant breeding rather than any older tradition.

In China the crape myrtle acquired an unusual literary and official association. Ziwei is also the name of the Ziwei enclosure, the circumpolar region of the sky that Chinese astronomy treated as the celestial court of the emperor; the tree was planted at palaces and government offices, and during the Tang dynasty the central secretariat was for a period actually renamed the Ziwei Province, so that officials of that body could be spoken of by the name of the tree.

From that came its settled sense in Chinese poetry and garden practice: high office honourably held, sincerity, and a devotion that outlasts the season. The tree was also planted at temples and at halls of learning, and the length of its bloom, from midsummer well into autumn, made it a natural emblem of endurance. In the western flower language, where it arrived late, it carries the milder and more general meaning of eloquence. The Chinese associations are the older and the better attested, and are the ones to lead with.