Shore pine styling

Here's a small shore pine. I grabbed it after very little inspection for three reasons. It had an ok trunk with cool bark, it was growing in an area that actually encouraged roots, and it had a whole lot of foliage.

 

It took me a fair bit of thinking to decide what I wanted to do with this tree. Looking closely, I saw that the biggest horizontal branch was just as big as the ascending trunk, and that it really just looked like the letter T if you took a step back. This was unsatisfactory. It was also very long, with many secondary branches, and many buds, so I took this step to draw it away from the T shape, and condense the form of the tree.

  

It still didn't look right to me. The top left branch was coming out too far. There was also a wonderfully ramified little cluster being hidden inside the crown, and I didn't like the dead branch on top. I saw a nice back branch that I wanted to pull up to be the new apex, while chopping off most of the current one, but that seemed drastic, even though it would look good. In the end I cut off the dead top branch, and used the stump to pull the top left branch up vertically. I pulled the end of that branch down to improve the silhouette, and I spun the tree 180 degrees to make use of the "back" branches.

This is the result, which I am pretty pleased with. It is much improved, but for some reason not yet satisfactory. I will fiddle with it no more until next year: a time I pray it lives to see.

Also, here is the small new planting area I created. This used to be a mound of dirt, run through with salmon berries, but I dug it all apart and made a spot for growing too-small trees.  If you look closely you can see a few tiny ones that I had, for lack of another place, in pots.