Mugo styling with inverse taper

Design
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I got a little pinus envy and wound up bringing home a mugo. Totally on accident…

Anyways, it was a rushed impulse buy and I didn’t get much time to comb through it very well, and it was packed inside with dead needles. Got it home, cleaned out the dead needles, trimmed dead and weak branches out and found a gnarly whorl in the trunk. Initially I was intrigued by the branch on the left thinking it could be a cool Jin feature. Now after finding this massive swelling up top I’m wondering if it should be the apex eventually.

I’m not sure how to handle it short of either lobbing the whole top 2/3 of the tree off or doing some major hard cuts and carving that whorl down. Either way I’m sure that kind of radical design should wait quite some time as I would like to repot it next spring while it still has good foliar mass.

This is my first pine and I’m just not sure what to do with it right now. What’s the Mirai community think? Hard trunk chop or carve the whorl down?

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Before making such as drastic trunk chop, I would cut out some of the branches in the upper swollen whorl to see how develops. I would focus on removal of the bigger ones unless they have some branching of their own.

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Hey,
If it were mine I’d also hold off on chopping.
That branch below the red line doesn’t seem that strong, you might end up loosing the tree or get serious dieback.
From some angles it doesn’t seem that bad.
Marty’s advice would be the way to go IMO.
I’d wait a year or two before deciding.

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