hmmm ... no pic of the yew overall ... if its as close to the house as the holly ... it is/was improperly planted too close to the house ... it had value as a cute babe ... now it is a geriatric monster.. and most likely should go ... and i will hold that opinion .. with or w/o a pic ... cut it to 4 feet.. and then start digging and get rid of it ... using the height to start wiggling it out as you continue to dig and cut roots .. [make sure you know where all the buried utilities are at a new house] i learned this lesson with my first house.. keeping the history of the house in mind.. i tried to restore and save every plant i could.. 5 years later.. i achieved nirvana .. when i removed the last nightmare problem that SOB left me.. lol ... think of it more along the lines of an opportunity to make your mark on your new landscape.. rather than the loss of a nightmare ... can you trim a yew that way.. sure.. why not.. its yours.. will you spend the next 5 or 10 years hoping it will turn into a reasonable looking plant.. yeah.. probably ... all i ask is ... do you want to look at a mutant for that period of time... i have no experience working with holly .. but frankly .... i would put it in the same class of project.. and chuck it ... your landscape is what YOU make it.. and dealing with the prior owners problems.. makes it about him.. rather than your dream of what your new garden is all about ... good luck ken

I can send you cuttings, let me know how many and what lengths. You just pay postage for them. Don't have variety names. No guarantee for success. Email me your details. Janoyan

Here's a repeat of my post from another thread: Posting photos is pretty easy. Go to Photobucket.com and set up a free account. Upload your pictures to that account....make sure the pictures aren't HUGE tho. Once you have your photos all uploaded, open 2 browsers...one here and the other at photobucket. In this message section, type what you want (ie. Plumeria name, etc) then from your second browser at photobucket, click the 3rd bar down under the picture you want to use...the one that says HTML Code. Just clicking on that space copies the pic. Go back to the message box here, right click and hit paste. You can do this several times. It really is easy once you try it...We all would love to see some pics! Jo

Thanks for the feedback - you've woken me up to this problem - too many other jobs, so I haven't done anything about it for a while. I had an agricultural engineer who has a local shop come around but he wasn't clear on what the problem was/ couldn't identify it. He pointed mainly back to the tree itself - bad stock. His only suggestion is as is written on the pages I looked up about fungus (eg as wm3y said - for shot hole disease) - copper and sulphur spray and to spray a bit on the ground around the tree Unfortunately I'm too busy and haven't done that yet - on the to do list. I cut down two apricots and a fig on the other side of the house, so not sure how it will go with this cherry -will see in the spring. Regarding other factors -difficult to say. The other tree could be a problem - it's in the way of grapes also, but my wife's mother gave it to us, so removing it has some other problems tied to it ;) - I was thinking of planting cuttings somewhere else and may do so next spring. Animals - not sure what it could be - I think it could only be some insect if it's not a fungus/disease as we don't have any animal problems, and I haven't seen any signs of chewing etc. when I pulled out the apricots. The story with the fig may have been partly to do with my pruning it hard towards the end of summer and too much water- it developed cracks between the trunk and branches and dried up. Maybe I overwatered it - with my desire to plant everywhere, I had vegetables growing underneath it and was watering them -maybe it was the water, but the strange thing was that it was easy to pull the tree out. I didn't find much of the root system at all but I couldn't see that they'd been chewed either - a mystery to me. On the other hand, it may have to do with the soil/watering and corresponding good conditions for fungus development. The soil is quiet compacted, so outside the area the tree was planted where there is manure/compost etc, we have a different scenario and with my desire to do deep watering, maybe I did overwater for the type of soil that is there - but how do you deep water without watering ;) ?. I'm gardening because I'd like to have natural food without chemicals but to be honest, it's quite difficult if you're not always on top of things and studying up on things more and more and I don't have the required time for this to do it properly, so I'm happy with the plants that do well and for the others I try my best.