You state that your yews 'won't survive cutting down to stumps to restart.'

Yew actually responds extremely well to hard cutting back. 70 is no age at all for a yew and it is possible to rejuvenate even the most specimens. If you could fence off the yews, even temporarily, from the deer I think you could get your grotto back.

Have you a pic of the whole area? I'm having trouble picturing this.

A clickable link to your pic is below.

tj

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:242508}}

Try these two links

http://www.inspectionsbybob.com/media/jphoto/test-galary/test-everything/p3014235-195x146.jpg

and

http://www.inspectionsbybob.com/media/jphoto/test-galary/test-everything/p3014234-195x146.jpg

I had to find a place I could load them but not make them "public"

Um, perhaps some pix that my mature vision could see?
Those are a tad small to try and determine if the yews could be selectively pruned to work or an alternative would be better.

tj

That is one seriously cool dragon sculpture! Not at all what I was expecting.

No ideas, though-just wanted to tell you I like your dragon-a lot.

We had the Yews cut down to short stumps and NOT ground out....

We will see if they sprout this spring... once we could see where they were 65 years ago, they were NOT what we expected. They were 6 separate "specimen plants" in a half-moon...NOT a closed area... looks VERY different once opened up...