Evelyn; thank you for your knowledge and advice. In the end of March I went out there and meticulously nipped every speck of evident golden canker. In between each cut I sterilized the nipper with rubbing alcohol. The pagoda looked primed and sculpted for an awesome spring flourish. ……….UNTIL…..this past weekend. We were right in the bullseye of that heavy wet snow and Saturday we woke to a beautifully flocked but cruelly stricken tree. Attached are a couple of photos. The left-most main stem with the two secondary stems branching off of that looks like it’s shot. Both of those secondary branches are split through the middle. We lost a few top branches on the right-most trunks but the trunks themselves are intact; probably because as you can see, we had previously shored them up by tethering them to the now destroyed trunk to the left. They had grown very horizontal to begin with and were in danger of toppling or breaking under just the weight of leaves and berries. These trunks will probably survive for a few more years if we keep them lashed to the dead stem. And new suckers will grow out from the base of the broken stem. We’ve been cutting them back each year. We could train one or two of them to replace this year’s loss. However, these will be suckers off the existing root mass. Not new stems with their own roots. Will these be inevitably weaker?

Question: Should we just dig out and replace this clump? It was the centerpiece of our new landscaping finished last fall so it’s a sad loss. How quickly could a new Pagoda grow? Can we get one that’s already good sized? Would a red bud be a good replacement? Our theme is a Japanese garden and I do like redbud but don’t they grow sooo slow? We’d value your advice. Any other small tree suggestions?