Update pictures of my windswept Yamadori Taxus.

First a short recap/history: It was discovered and collected by me during my visit to the U.K in November 2007. It was growing from underneath a large flat-like bolder that itself was covered by several smaller ones!

Below: After some hard work finally freed from its crushing heavy load!

Below: Spring 2010. After a scary time when it lost most of its foliage, it fought back with a lot of strong-growing new branches! I saw such beautiful movement and story in that long broken thick branch that protrudes to the right from the base of the trunk. But I basically had to rebuild her a completely new frame from her bottom upwards! With all-new branches on and in my eyes a very promising live base for something daring?! But such a change to create a vision you have from your inspiring living entity doesn’t come too often when you live in an almost Yamadori-less country like Holland! So, of course, I went for it!

Below: An hour later in its new pot with plenty of room to grow fast producing lots of growth on the fast-thickening branches!

Below: 24-4-2016. After 6 years of heavy feeding and free growing, it is time for branch selection and foliage thinning. All this time I was thinking a lot about how to utilise that long almost ripped-off to the right protruding Jin in my design!

Below: One hour and one full garbage back with cut-off branches later, this is all that was left of the 6 years of growth! The new top truck section went during this time from pinky thick to wrist-thick…amazing!

Below: This is how she looks after all the unusable branches were removed!

Below: 17-9-2020. And this is how she looks today. A windswept Yew. Besides some guidewires, there is not much wire on it at this moment. The future plan is that in just a few more years it will look like a Yew that is bettered by seasonal winds and storms from the left behind. The direction of the deadwood and protruding long Jin is proof of just how fears and devastating these winds are! In the near future when all the now still young branches are more mature and a bit fuller with small foliage, the outline of the foliage pads and the total outline image will be much clearer! But no way with perfectly triangle-shaped foliage peds on exuberant bright deadwood as we see so often these days! Nothing wrong with that, don’t get me wrong! But with limited and precious time on my hand…why should I do what so many others have done before? I wanted to create my expression of strong wind through a struggling but surviving tree! And it happens to be this Yew with that long Jin that started the thought of that idea again in my head! Funny how those things go?! And now the hunt for a special rectangular pot has begun and the next couple of years will be spent on filling and refining all the smaller foliage and deadwood. Height: 65cm/26 inch.

---

I hope you like it?!

Cheers, and stay safe everybody!

Hans van Meer.