Depending upon who you ask, this warm-weather loving tree is a crepe myrtle or a crape myrtle. No matter how you spell it, this beautiful, flowering tree is recognizable by its ruffled flowers and multiple stems which shed their bark each year.
The flowers can vary from pale pink to lavender to almost red. As beautiful as crape myrtles can be when flowering, they are even more stunning in the fall. Their leaves become bright shades of yellows, oranges and red.
As much as I associate crape myrtles with living in the southeastern United States, they are actually native to the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. This stunning crape myrtle botanical print came from Familiar Indian Flowers a work by Lena Lowis. It was published in 1878.
If you would like to download this vintage crape myrtle botanical print, just click on it to view the largest version of this file I have.
This image is copyright free and in the public domain anywhere that extends copyrights 70 years after death or at least 120 years after publication when the original illustrator is unknown.
