Both “crepe myrtle” and “crape myrtle” are correct, and neither spelling is a mistake. The two forms have coexisted in English for centuries because the underlying fabric word itself has two legitimate spellings, one rooted in French and the other in older English usage. The split is less about right and wrong than about which tradition you happen to follow, and the answer depends on whether you ask a horticulturist, a nurseryman, a dictionary editor, or your state’s cooperative extension service.
Why a Tree Is Named After a Fabric
The common name exists because the flower petals of Lagerstroemia species have a distinctly crinkled, paper-thin texture that reminded early European observers of crepe fabric. If you have ever rubbed a crepe myrtle petal between your fingers, you know the comparison is apt: the tissue is delicate, slightly ruffled, and almost translucent. The “myrtle” half of the name comes from the plant’s superficial resemblance to true myrtles (Myrtus), with which it shares glossy leaves and a similar growth habit, even though the two are not closely related.
The fabric known as crepe (or crape) is woven or treated so that its surface is puckered and slightly rough rather than smooth and shiny. That texture is what links a bolt of cloth to a flowering tree. The question of how to spell the fabric’s name, though, is where the confusion begins, because English inherited the word through two different channels.
Two Spellings, Two Histories
The word ultimately traces back to the Latin “crispus,” meaning curled or wrinkled. French adopted it as “crêpe,” with the circumflex accent marking a lost letter. English borrowed the word early, well before modern French spelling conventions solidified, and the result was “crape,” a fully anglicized form that appeared in print from at least the seventeenth century. Later, as French cultural influence on English fashion and cuisine intensified, the spelling “crepe” (sometimes with the accent, sometimes without) gained ground. By the twentieth century, “crepe” had become the dominant spelling for most fabric and food contexts: crepe paper, crepe de chine, crepes for breakfast.
“Crape,” however, did not disappear. It survived in specific niches, and one of the most durable of those niches was horticulture. Many American nurseries and botanical references adopted “crape myrtle” as their standard and have stuck with it. The result is that the older spelling lives on in garden catalogs and plant labels even as the rest of the English-speaking world moved toward “crepe.”
The Mourning Fabric That Kept “Crape” Alive
One reason “crape” persisted as a distinct word rather than simply merging with “crepe” is that it carved out a specialized meaning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In England and France, elaborate mourning customs required the bereaved, especially women, to wear heavy black garments and black crape veils for extended periods. Widows were expected to maintain this somber dress for up to four years after their loss, and the specific fabric associated with mourning was consistently spelled “crape” in English texts of the period.1PubMed. The death of mourning: from Victorian crepe to the little black dress The dull, crimped texture of mourning crape was deliberately unglamorous, signaling grief rather than fashion. Shiny fabrics were considered inappropriate for mourning; crape’s matte finish served as a visible social cue.
This association gave “crape” a semantic weight that “crepe” lacked. When you read Victorian novels or period etiquette manuals, “crape” nearly always means mourning fabric, while “crepe” (when it appears at all in that era) refers to the broader textile category. The two spellings drifted apart in meaning even though they described the same basic material. As mourning customs faded in the twentieth century, the specialized use of “crape” declined, but by then the horticultural name had already been set in many American references.
When the Tree Came to Europe and America
The genus Lagerstroemia is native to Asia and parts of Oceania. The species most commonly planted in Western gardens, Lagerstroemia indica, was introduced to Europe in 1759 and reached America a few decades later.2ISHS Acta Horticulturae. EVALUATING AND PROMOTING THE COSMOPOLITAN AND MULTIPURPOSE LAGERSTROEMIA By the time the tree became a staple of Southern American landscapes in the nineteenth century, “crape” was still a perfectly standard English spelling. The earliest American horticultural writers who needed a common name for Lagerstroemia reached for the word they knew, and many of them spelled it “crape.” That spelling became entrenched in Southern gardening culture, extension bulletins, and nursery trade usage long before “crepe” overtook “crape” in everyday English.
The timing matters because common plant names tend to calcify. Once a name appears in agricultural bulletins, plant patents, and popular gardening books, it takes on a life of its own. Changing the spelling of a plant’s common name is a bit like changing the spelling of a city: technically possible, practically messy, and guaranteed to annoy someone.
Who Uses Which Spelling Today
If you look at institutional usage across the United States, you will find a genuine split. The United States National Arboretum, which has conducted extensive Lagerstroemia breeding programs and released many popular cultivars, uses “crapemyrtle” as a single unhyphenated word. Several major university extension services in the Southeast follow suit with “crape myrtle” (two words). Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary lists “crepe myrtle” as the primary entry, treating “crape myrtle” as a variant. The American Horticultural Society has used “crape myrtle.” Major nursery chains and garden centers vary by region, and even within the same company, you can sometimes find both spellings on different product labels.
Outside the United States, the picture shifts. British and Australian sources lean toward “crepe myrtle,” which makes sense given that “crape” as a standalone word has largely fallen out of common use in those countries. International horticultural literature, written for a global audience, tends to favor “crepe myrtle” or simply use the Latin name to sidestep the issue.
There is also the question of whether it is one word or two. “Crapemyrtle,” “crape myrtle,” “crape-myrtle,” “crepe myrtle,” and “crepemyrtle” all appear in published sources. The closed-up single-word form, “crapemyrtle,” has a following among professional horticulturists who argue that since the plant is not a true myrtle, joining the words makes it clear we are talking about a distinct organism rather than a type of myrtle. This convention is common in botany: “bluebell” is one word because it is not literally a blue bell, and “sunflower” is one word because it is not a flower made of sun. Whether this argument persuades you depends on how much you care about taxonomic precision in your garden notes.
The Botanical Name Sidesteps the Whole Debate
The one name that nobody argues about is Lagerstroemia. The genus was named by Carl Linnaeus in honor of Magnus von Lagerström, a Swedish merchant and friend of Linnaeus who supplied him with plant specimens from Asia. Within the genus, Lagerstroemia indica is by far the most commonly planted species, though interspecific hybrids (especially crosses with L. faurei, a Japanese species valued for its bark and disease resistance) now dominate the nursery trade.
If you are writing anything where precision matters, such as a plant order form, a landscape plan, or a HOA dispute about what you are allowed to plant, using the Latin name eliminates ambiguity. “Lagerstroemia indica ‘Natchez’” tells everyone exactly what you mean. “Crepe myrtle” or “crape myrtle” tells them roughly what you mean, which is usually enough for conversation but occasionally not enough for commerce.
Does the Spelling Affect Anything Practical?
In gardening and landscaping, the spelling you choose has zero effect on how you grow, prune, or care for the tree. No cultivar is exclusive to one spelling. No disease guide or pruning method changes based on whether the label says “crepe” or “crape.” If you search online for care instructions, either spelling will return useful results, though “crepe myrtle” tends to generate slightly more hits because it aligns with the more common modern spelling of the fabric word.
Where spelling can matter, in a minor way, is in formal writing. If you are drafting an article for a gardening magazine, the publication’s style guide will dictate the spelling. If you are submitting a paper to a horticultural journal, check which spelling the journal uses. If you are writing a plant tag for a nursery, match whatever your suppliers and local extension service use, because consistency builds trust with customers. None of this makes one spelling “right” and the other “wrong”; it is purely a matter of editorial consistency.
For casual use, pick whichever spelling feels natural to you. If you grew up in the American South and your grandmother called it a crape myrtle, there is no reason to change. If you learned the word from a dictionary or a British gardening book, “crepe myrtle” is equally defensible. The only genuinely wrong move is to insist that the other person’s spelling is an error.
Common Misconceptions About the Name
A few myths circulate about where the common name comes from. One is that the tree was named after crepe paper specifically. Crepe paper was not widely manufactured until the late nineteenth century, and the tree had already been called crape myrtle (or crepe myrtle) for decades by then. The name comes from crepe fabric, not the party-supply product.
Another misconception is that “crape” is a misspelling or corruption of “crepe.” It is not. “Crape” is the older English form, and it appeared in dictionaries and literary texts long before the tree was introduced to Western cultivation. If anything, “crepe” is the newer arrival in English, borrowed more directly from modern French. Calling “crape” a misspelling is a bit like calling “colour” a misspelling of “color”: it is a legitimate variant with a clear historical pedigree, even if it is less common today.
A third myth holds that the choice of spelling reflects some difference in the plant itself, as if “crape myrtles” and “crepe myrtles” were different species or cultivar groups. They are not. The same tree, the same genus, the same flowers. The spelling is a property of the English language, not the plant.
The Broader Pattern of Dual-Spelling Plant Names
Crape myrtle is not the only plant caught between two spellings, though it may be the most argued-about. English common names for plants are notoriously unstable because they were never standardized by any central authority the way Latin binomial names were. A single species can have dozens of common names across different regions, and even the “same” name can be spelled in multiple ways. Consider “donut” and “doughnut” peach (a flat peach variety), or the persistent confusion between “barbecue” and “barbeque” in the names of certain pepper cultivars.
The lack of a universal plant-naming authority for common names is by design. Latin binomials exist precisely because common names are a mess, and botanists gave up trying to police them centuries ago. The International Code of Nomenclature governs scientific names, but no equivalent body governs what you call a plant in English. Regional usage, historical accident, and the preferences of influential nurseries and writers all shape common names. “Crape myrtle” vs. “crepe myrtle” is one of the more visible examples of this inherent messiness, but it is not an anomaly. It is how common plant names have always worked.
How Cultivar Breeding Changed What People Search For
The modern crape myrtle market is dominated by named cultivars and hybrids rather than straight species. Breeding programs, particularly those conducted at the U.S. National Arboretum from the 1960s onward, produced cultivars with improved disease resistance, a wider range of flower colors, and better cold hardiness. Many of these cultivars carry Native American tribal names: ‘Natchez,’ ‘Muskogee,’ ‘Tuscarora,’ ‘Sioux,’ ‘Tonto.’ Others are named after cities or carry fanciful marketing names.
The practical consequence for the spelling debate is that gardeners searching for a specific cultivar increasingly search by the cultivar name rather than by the common name. If you want a white-flowering, large-growing crape myrtle, you probably search for “Natchez crape myrtle” or just “Lagerstroemia Natchez.” The cultivar name does not care whether you spell the common name with an “a” or an “e,” and most search engines treat the two spellings as equivalent anyway. In this sense, the controversy has become less practically relevant over time even as it remains a favorite topic for gardening forums and social media debates.
Nursery websites, for their part, have learned to include both spellings in their metadata. A well-optimized plant listing will mention “crape myrtle,” “crepe myrtle,” and “crapemyrtle” somewhere on the page so that no potential customer is lost to a spelling preference. The market, in its pragmatic way, has settled the question by refusing to settle it.