 We're at the Davis Arboretum on Auburn University's campus this morning, and we're going to talk a little bit about pruning crape myrtles. Before we start pruning, there's a couple of things we need to make sure we have. A pair of loppers, a pair of hand shears, maybe a small saw, and we always want to make sure we have safety equipment. I've got a pair of eyeglasses on and we need to make sure they're safety-approved eyeglasses, not cheap plastic eyeglasses that can cause more damage than it actually helps sometimes. You want a good pair of gloves and minor mismatch, but they serve the same purpose. And generally you want to have a hat, and if possible long sleeves. Any time you prune any type of tree, whether it's a crape myrtle, a fruit tree, or an ornamental plant, one of the first things you want to look for are dead, diseased, or broken parts of the plant. And we're going to prune those out first just as a general rule to keep that plant healthy and eliminate where disease or insects could enter that plant. So as we look at this mature crape myrtle, you see a couple of places where limbs have died and gone back to the trunk. This is a good example here. We're going to come up and prune that back, and these pruning cuts are not necessarily shaping the tree or aesthetics, but this is purely for the health of the tree and for maintenance of the tree. Now we're going to come back and look for crossing branches, water sprouts, weakly attached branches to go ahead and prune those out. As this crape myrtle has matured, it's kind of gotten a little crowded here at the base. You see a couple of pieces that have grown together, and we're simply going to take one of those pieces out, open up the trunk so that it's a little more aesthetically pleasing in the fall and winter, so we can see that texture change and that color change of the bark. Pruning is a lot like a haircut. As long as you're not doing something unhealthy to the tree and it's aesthetically pleasing to you, that's what you're striving for.