What is planted in your garden that will enhance your winter decor? Many of the elements that are present all year can have a true opportunity to shine at the end of the growing season.

What’s a gardener to do in winter? Bundle up, get outside and prune crape myrtles of course.

Most of the crapes at Busch Gardens are pruned the “right way.” Here’s the simple way of explaining what I mean by “the right way.”

• eliminate water sprouts, those straight shoots usually coming off the branch where something was removed from the previous season
• branches that are rubbing
• diseased, dead or damaged material

When the weather turns colder I often get questions about our winter landscaping tasks in the park. I personally feel like we have more to do in the off-season than we do when we are open. The off-season is full of projects that prepare us for the coming year.

During the season our job is to maintain the park for our guests. The hedges are trimmed, the turf is mowed, the flower beds are changed from pansies to summer annuals to mums and everything gets watered and fed as needed. All of this happens before the guests arrive.

You may notice a change to our front entrance this year. We've added new trees.

Previously, there was a line of trees in the sidewalk, each surrounded by a tree grate. A tree's normal root habit is about a foot deep and several times the crown's diameter, for maximum access to rainfall and oxygen exchange. Our tree grates were about six feet across, within the drip-line of the tree itself, so the trees suffered.

Even through the winter, the landscaping work doesn't stop here at Busch Gardens.

Some of our biggest winter projects involve trees. It's the right time to cut crape myrtles, and a great time to examine our all of our trees.

Much of our park is wooded, and the rides that fly through these areas depend on our tree crew for safety. Winter maintenance involves clearing brush and young trees from under the coasters, and utilizing knowledge of growth habits to create a wide swath for the coasters' passage.