My 99-cent stick

It began life as a 99-cent stick that I found in a cardboard box at the grocery store about 10 years ago.

It didn't look like much, just a foot-long dry twig with bare roots. The hand-written sign on the box said "Crape Myrtles -- 99 cents."

I figured, what the heck. How wrong can I go for 99 cents?

So I added it to my cart.

My mother had always told me that the right time to buy any sort of flowering bush was when it was in bloom, so that I could see exactly what color it would be. (This was of prime importance to her because she had once bought an azalea, not in bloom, that was labeled "Hershey Red" to replace one that had died in a row of Hershey Red azaleas along the front of the house. It turned out to be the wrong shade of red. She never got over it.)

I had always followed her advice in this regard. But I took a chance on the crape myrtle stick.

I was surprised when it flourished. It grew about a foot the first year. Then it began to really shoot up, and by the third year it started producing blossoms.

I was surprised again. I had never seen a crape myrtle with blooms like this. Each tiny blossom was bright pink in the center and white at the edges. The effect was like the colors in a Christmas candy cane. Today, it's about 15 feet tall and produces a profusion of blossoms.

Crape myrtles are ubiquitous in Richmond. I have about a half-dozen mature crape myrtles in my yard -- lavender, pink, red and burgundy. (I despise white crape myrtles and azaleas; when the blooms begin to die they look like discarded Kleenex.)

I asked around among my friends. Nobody had ever seen a red and white crape myrtle. I began to pay close attention to crape myrtle trees in my summertime travels. Nope, no red and white crape myrtles. So far, I've never seen another one like mine.

Finally I Googled crape myrtle varieties. There on the Texas AgriLife Extension Service site, run by Texas A&M University, I found a picture of a crape myrtle like mine. Appropriately enough, it's called Peppermint Lace.

You can buy a Peppermint Lace crape myrtle on Amazon and other sites.

They cost about six times more than I paid for my bare-root stick.