Thanks for the words of encouragement because I'm really dreading the prospect of contacting the nursery to have them "make good" on replacing the trees or refunding my money. So far, still not a sign of a leaf. I'm watering them every other day in this heat - can't win...don't know if I'm drowning them now or if I didn't give them enough water in the winter...I'm sure the nursery will try to blame me for whatever it ends up being, but every time I requested specific instructions, their attitude was not to worry about them - that Crape Myrtles are so hardy they can survive anything.

Can't help you here. I had two crape myrtles that were the centerpiece of my bed in the front of the house die over the winter. One sent up 3 suckers from the base, the other is completely dead. Like a dummy, I planted two dynamite crape myrtles in their place at the wife's insistence. Were they healthy when they entered dormancy? Mine got powdery mildew pretty bad just before leaf drop and we know what happened to those. I know we have been in a drought for a year and I believe you also have been? Crape myrtles are hardy in our zone, though. My parents live about 30 minutes from my place and they have literally dozens of them. Some trimmed up every year, and others left to grow naturally. They have never lost a single one in about 15 years.

A few years ago a cold snap froze crapemyrtles here to the ground. At that time these two Zunis (planted 3' apart) were approaching 9' tall. They are just now approaching 6' again. But the width is somethng that I have to control, because (if this is typical of all Zunis) you can see the floppy nature of the growth. Before the freeze they were more tree-ish but even then had the same widening lateral spread. Hope this helps your decision. hortster

The garden center is selling trees so, of course, they want you to space them as closely together as you could be convinced was reasonable. I look for opportunities to see if the tree spacing can be coordinated with any of the background. Here, there is a fence panel repeating at distinct intervals -- probably 8'. Yet for the height of tree you need (as it will have proportionate width) that still seems like a bit tight of spacing, if you want the trees to display some character as individuals, and not just a monolithic background screen. As a compromise, I would consider a wider spacing, such as every other other fence panel (every 16' +/-) and making it a double row. That way you still get a solid screen, but the front row of trees stand out with enough separation from each other that they read as individuals, not just generic screening. (A single row at 8' on center would look like a giant hedge.) And you have plenty of yard depth to do it. Of course, the backs of the front row will blend together with the fronts of the back row, but since you won't see it from your primary viewpoint, it won't be a point that matters. With tree screening, the fence itself and the ground space below the trees can become quite dark. The fence will tend to disappear into a black hole. The conditions stand a good chance of being unfriendly to growing shrubs, and much more suitable to growing groundcover ... like a mass of ferns or something. At any rate, you'd probably want all the space below trees to be a bed rather than lawn, since grass isn't going to grow, giving you the opportunity to cut down on mowing. Natchez can be a lovely tree, but with a background of open sky -- often almost white -- a white flower color strikes me as likely to be disappointingly underwhelming. In your inspiration picture, where there is dark forest behind the right-side trees, the white flowers stand out. But at the left-side trees, the white flowers are lost in the upper portion of the trees. 'Muskogee' -- also a big crape -- strikes me as a much more effective flower color choice. Anything BUT white in a big crape would work.