I've been chomping at the bit to get started on a yew bonsai this year, but haven't had any luck finding anything usable from either neighbors relandscaping, or from garden centers. Well, yesterday, while strolling through a garden center, as always, I browsed the yews. A dingey looking 1 gallon shrub caught my eye. It was knocked over, dirt spilled out, and probably not one that someone would want to put in their yard. I picked it up, and found that it had a nice single trunk, with a good curved shape to it. I decided to buy it, and give it a try. It is a taxus media "dark green spreader", in case that matters. Anyways, as a said, it was tipped over, but appeared to be recent, because all the soil, both in the pot and on the ground, was moist. I scoped the roots out, and they looked good. It was in your standard run-of-the-mill cruddy garden center soil. It needed to be repotted in a major way, due to the cruddy soil, and the fact that it was disturbed when kicked over, leaving it unstable in the nursery pot. Anyway, I repotted it into gritty mix right away, did not do any rootwork other then removing ALL of the old soil, and have it hanging out in the safety of the shade. So, my question pertains to pruning. Seeing it's freshly repotted, should I be leaving it alone as far as pruning is concerned? It has the nice curvey trunk, but as you can imagine, it is within the rest of the growth. It will require some minor branch removal for the most part, but there is one larger branch towards the bottom that needs to go. The trunk is about 1" in diameter, and this branch is maybe 3/8" to 1/2" thick, but has a fair amount of foliage with it. I do not want to kill it by removing too much foliage, so I figured I get some opinions. Thanks!

Joe