CRAPE MYRTLE

I'm linking this post to Beverly's PINK SATURDAY. I love going over and looking at everyone's lovely things and sites and cooking and antiques and handwork and treasures every Saturday. And every one is PINK in some form or fashion. Please go look in on some of the wonderful displays and arrangements---all unique, and all uniquely beautiful.



Crepe is for the gauzy fabric with all the little convolutions which catch the light, and for the funeral hangings, and the stuff of dreams festooning gym ceilings at many a small-town high school dance; it's also for those encroaching wee satiny areas on the otherwise flawless complexions of us ladies of a certain age.

Crape Myrtle, however, is a fluty plant, in a spectrum of colors to make peacocks bow. It’s a softly blowing, wispy, ethereal floof of blossoms on pale green limbs, in the hues of watermelons and plums and roses in the shade, of lemony drinks in Summertime, of the cut surface of a yeller tomato, fresh from Mammaw’s corner plants, of the swaying purple iris behind the Snow-on-the-Mountain and the same shades of verbena chiming in their little notes of pleasure in the Summer sun.

My favorite is Watermelon, but it just won’t grow here in this frosty section of the Heartland.

And I spell it c-r-a-p-e, always, despite dictionaries and detractors. It’s the way my Mammaw spelled it in her daily letters to me, though we lived not ten miles apart---the way she thought of it, the way she put it down in her unmistakable swirled hand: “My Crape Myrtles are just SO pretty right now.” “The Crape Myrtles I planted out at the churchyard are in full bloom, with lots of the petals falling like pink snow on the graves.”

She LOVED a Crape Myrtle, and since it’s my very favorite plant of all time, Southern or other, I spell it just the way she did---she of the long-distance love affair with the staff at Burpee and Park and Nichols, her letters to them as avidly read and as kindly replied to as were the ones she sent off to me on the afternoon truck.


It will forever be CRAPE Myrtle. It just is.

And I need some----RIGHT NOW.