These guys had a rough spring. There was a lot of construction going on around my house during the spring...still ongoing actually...with enough activity in/around the garage that I was having trouble maintaining a proper two-step. They both got frostbitten a couple of times. Then they got stuck in the dark garage for a week because excavators were digging up my lawn. I thought it would only be a day or two so I didn't bring them back into the basement...but it wound up being much longer before I could get them back outside during the day.
They both ended up dropping all their foliage and some of the smaller branches and were starting to look convincingly dead-dead...but now that heat has been turned on and we've had almost a full week on 90F days, they've begun to wake up again.
Haters gonna hate on the whole geode thing...but I rather like this larger one:
It really is a nice tree when it's all filled in. Hopefully I can keep some weep in the larger branches and start working on better ramification and fullness later this year and into next. It's starting to look as I initially envisioned. I was initially thinking an air root or two...but I'm going to forget about even attempting that and just focus on filling out a canopy and hoping the exposed roots don't plump up too much more...
Even though this was always the "backup" tree, it's starting to show some poential:
It needs some more root work...especially on the back. It was worse off than it's sibling though so for now it's just grow-grow-grow to gain back some vigor.