Excessive Rain Killing Crapes

PASCAGOULA, Miss. -- A very wet June has wreaked havoc on Pascagoula's crape myrtles.

"Unfortunately right now, all this rain is beating off the pretty blooms," said Kevin Hall with the landscaping division of Optech, a private contractor for the city of Pascagoula.

Hall said the unusually wet month has been a blessing and a curse.

While it's harder to control flower beds when rainwater sits on the ground and causes plants to rot, it also means less watering with the company's 100-gallon water tank truck. "This is actually a break for us because usually we have to spend two or three days a week watering by hand," he said.

He said the excessive rain has pelted the petals of the hundreds of crape myrtle trees around town, so that they may only have another week or two of blooms left. "But we're not complaining. At the same time we need the water. It could stop tomorrow and not rain for a month," he said.

That's not likely to happen, said Keith Williams, a hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Mobile who studies rainfall and river flooding. "June has been a pretty wet month," he said.

Williams said Mobile had 13.19 inches of rain, which is nine inches above normal rainfall for the month. He said the yearly total is only a 10th of an inch over normal.

Jackson County received 9.43 inches of rain in June according to reports from the Port Authority. Rainfall for the year was measured at 26 inches.

Williams said a semi-tropical system has developed over the central Gulf with a stationary front positioned to the northwest portion of Mississippi. "It's been trapping all this tropical moisture," he said. "The moisture is just trapped here until we can get some fairly strong cold front to come through."

Williams said the Coast should expect to see rain through Thursday.

Which is bad news for gardeners, said Mike Steede, extension director with the George County office of the Mississippi State University Extension Service.

"When it's cloudy, naturally the sun's not shining, so plants don't tend to grow as well," Steede said. "There's been very few days this whole month that it hasn't rained a little bit."

The wet weather allows plant diseases to thrive. Fortunately, crape myrtles seem to be immune to a lot of the illnesses ground plants suffer. "Crape myrtles are really tough," Steede said. "They're really hardy once you get them established. They are a really tough landscape plant. A lot of cities do them because they are a low-maintenance plant."