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See what I did there? That’s right. There’s more than one way to have pun with yew!

My taxes really have been filed already, by the way, but my wife gets credit for that. We made a deal a long time ago — and at times each of us regrets it — I pay the monthly bills, and she does our taxes. It works for us.

Anyway, to business and to taxus! I already posted about the yew dig on Bonsai Iterate. You can read that here if you like. Now I want to share the tree I got. Here it is before digging:

I’ve been watching the yews on this site for some time. As you can see from the photo above, this one had a clear sight line to the base, and that’s probably why I was bent on taking it. I have to admit, though, that many of the other trees that were collected on the same day had even more potential, and I might have looked harder before jumping in. Ah, well. One more rookie mistake for the old man.

Don’t get me wrong. I am excited for the potential in this specimen!

Above, you can see a big cut I made before I started digging. The cut branch/trunk was very straight and was not going to be part of the final design. That got a lot of branching out of the way so I could get to work.

If you look a little closer you might be able to see that I had to dig down quite a bit before I found the root flair. It was a good 8 inches below the soil line. It is important to find that flair in any plant you dig or you could find yourself lifting a rootball without any roots. In this case, it meant I had to move that much more dirt.

Here we are (just yew and I) after pulling it out of the hole. (Many thanks to James for his help!) In this photo, the plant is tipped up at a different angle than it was in the ground so it looks a good 6 feet tall despite being pruned at 4 feet for decades. In fact, I had to remove a big chunk of that thick crown to get it into my vehicle. Sometimes practical considerations make the decisions for you!

Digging and moving this thing was no easy task and I was exhausted by the time I had it in a grow box at home. It will stay in this box to recover for a couple of years at least.

From this angle you can appreciate the root spread at the base. It’s one of those plants that has a really strong taper from front and back, but looks too narrow from the sides. That big branch going to the upper left in the shot above is deadwood, so it will likely be shortened dramatically into Jin and Shari when styling begins… but that’s a couple of years off. Until then, I will do everything I can to get this tree healthy and strong. With any luck, I will get lots of back-budding down on the older wood and get a really strong taxus return!

No? Not funny? Oh well. I tried.