Here is the azalea I dug up Saturday. It is about 1.5 meter wide and over a meter high.

The plan is to spend a year looking at it, deciding what size to cut it back to, what the general shape should be, etc. I cut back a very little of the root ball to fit into the pot, which is about half a meter across. It is sitting in full sun right now, which means a couple of hours of sun and a lot of rain. Once it starts to get hot, about a month or so, it will go somewhere to get mostly morning sun.

You will probably end up cutting it back extensively. Curious to see this develop.
Is it really that large? You sure you got that right, that pot does not look like a half metre pot ..?

Ah, these Americans....

The pot is 35 cm across, the azalea is 1.90 across and 45 cm high. We planted it 14 years ago, I think. There is another one to dig up that was here in 1986.

It is sort of obvious a couple of branches to cut off, but not obvious to me right now how much to cut back. I think I know what the finished shape will be. We'll see if the azalea agrees with me.

your tree will come from the stems in the red area, I think

It's hard to see in the photo, but a couple of the branches are just suckers that came out of the base and go straight up. They are going. I would like to take the low one on the right, bend it down, and make a nice cascade, but the branch looks real weak. Most of the top goes, of course. And, I will lower the soil level somewhat and see how the trunks branch out. I don't think I want to keep any dead wood. Would I want to start chopping now? Wait a year? Chop a branch at a time over the summer? The root ball fills up the top half of the pot, and I don't think I want to touch it for a year or so.

I thought the pot was about a foot and a half, and I said half a meter. So, the issue is poor memory and lousy estimation, not inability to divide by three.

How does it look now? Have a new photo to post????

I haven't done a thing to it, except put it in a new pot when the neighbor's dog knocked that one off the stand.......

It spent the day drying the root ball out, and looked a little bedraggled for a while, but it is fine now. I may try to move it into a smaller pot and reduce the diameter some. Right now it is sitting on the back porch occupying so much room I can't get around it.

I spent two hours yesterday digging up another tree in the back yard and had to make an emergency trip to find something big enough to hold it. I at least need to get across the porch, but I have two or more old azaleas to dig up and at least one more elm. We should all have such problems, right?