I can wait however long. I appreciate the help. The trunk looked better when I first saw it, but now I'm not so sure. It's still a big trunk, just not as big as I first thought.
You really wont know for sure what you really have until you start reducing the soil ball from the top down to the point where lateral roots start emerging from the trunk. This will reveal the actual base of the tree. The problem with nursery trees in some cases, and this is one of them, there is a tendency for nurseries to up pot a tree by simply putting a smaller root bound tree into a larger container until it becomes root bound in that container and so on and so forth. There is no telling how often this might happen, but it does not matter to the nursery in the landscape trade. To make things worse every time the tree is potted up fresh soil is added into the new container usually from the top and up to the lowest branches. The tree then invades this new top soil with roots and you can see the result. Those large roots you see on the surface are likely to emerge from the actual trunk several inches below the surface and not in a configuration you will approve of.
I have found Mugo Pines, another tree treated in this manner, where the actual base of the tree was four or five inches below the soil surface. I would consider any tree grown as a bush or low growing tree is likely to be treated this way in a nursery setting. It is after all this bush form with no visiable or obvious trunk that sells for landscapes.
My usual method for dealing with nursery conifers is to remove soil from the bottom of the soil mass, but in this case you are going to have to start from the top and work it down to the actual base of the trunk before you can think about reducing the rest of the soil mass from the bottom up. If all those roots were not there, and obviously active, all you would have to do is to remove the top soil down to the root base and reduce from the bottom.
