Question: How can I make a yaupon holly into a tree? Mine is nothing more than a big shrub.

Answer: All yaupons are, genetically, shrubs. Nurserymen started training them as small trees in the 1950s. Now they’re some of our finest small trees for compressed urban sites. Determine which trunks will be the structural framework of your new tree, and remove the others. Prune slowly and carefully, one limb at a time. Don’t prune the canopy up too high. It’s difficult to get new side branches to develop once their predecessors have been removed.