First I built the structure with a mixture of cardboard, styrofoam, wine corks, and basically anything else I could find (this was a very low budget project.)
Then I covered the whole thing in papier-mâché.
Bent wire into branches and hot glued to the base. (Ignore hand)
Added paper mache (no more french spelling from here on out because I am tired of adding the diacritical marks) to the branches!
Then I painted the base brown (I end up changing this to gray later) and created the roots of the tree with aluminum foil. And then I spent 12 hours threading the bead tendrils and added them to the branches :)
Adding paper mache to the roots.
The finished piece again, in case you forgot what it looked like! Between the last picture and this one, I added more paper mache to the ends of the branches, yarn tendrils, and painted the whole thing gray/green.