Large Taxus cuspidata

Marcus I completely understand your point. What Ryan Neil said is a revelation to me also, although I wasn't there and have only seen the video. I believe the Japanese Yew in Ryan's video's best feature was the deadwood which is why he did exactly as you say and drew the eye to the large area up top. However I don't think the best feature on Pavel's tree is the deadwood. I think the deadwood in this tree is more of a complement to the rest of the design, rather than the dominating focal feature of Ryan's.

Andrew Campbell wrote:Marcus I completely understand your point. What Ryan Neil said is a revelation to me also, although I wasn't there and have only seen the video. I believe the Japanese Yew in Ryan's video's best feature was the deadwood which is why he did exactly as you say and drew the eye to the large area up top. However I don't think the best feature on Pavel's tree is the deadwood. I think the deadwood in this tree is more of a complement to the rest of the design, rather than the dominating focal feature of Ryan's.

I agree, with this tree the deadwood is more like the cherry on a chocolate sundae whereas the deadwood on Ryan's tree is a major component. Both are great trees mostly because they use their best features to their best design capability. There is a subtile use of deadwood that many cannot get a grasp on. Too often we see trees that have more meaningless deadwood just for the deadwood's sake, and because of this, the tree kind of stands there like a four year old on a street corner looking for its mother, lost in the clutter of everything that is going on around it.