Brown flowers on crepe myrtle

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sdfella
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Brown flowers on crepe myrtle

Post by sdfella » August 10th, 2020, 8:56 pm

Hello,
Short version: bought a house with a nice single trunk crepe mrytle in the front. The flowers this year are light in color and brown after only a couple weeks. It had a really bad black sooty mold issue last year so I pruned it to thin it out mid/late winter, not crepe murder, and used bayer/bioadvanced shrub and tree in early/mid spring following the directions and verifying online. I don't think the main ingredient imidicloprid would cause this issue. Since this tree is in the front lawn which had a little fungus, bioadvanced hose attached lawn fungicide applied mid-spring, but that was a mild application, no way that caused this issue to still occur in Aug.

Any ideas why this is happening? the fungicide? the combo? im a moron?

Thanks for your help

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MorpheusPA
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Re: Brown flowers on crepe myrtle

Post by MorpheusPA » August 10th, 2020, 10:51 pm

Bad year, probably. I'm looking at the greenery, not the flowers, and that seems fine. If you made me guess, it's a fungus that nipped the flower buds and is eating the flowers, but isn't otherwise having too much of a negative impact on the rest of the plant--but I certainly am not sure.

Definitely keep an eye on things to see if it continues or the greenery discolors, but it would hardly be the first time there was a bad year for a crepe myrtle. They're not what I'd call the most stable or healthiest plants around.

I have one and have more bad years than good ones as I'm strongly pushing the limits on those here in Pennsylvania.

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