You can combine and contrast vertical and wide-reaching shapes, mix plants with fine and bold textures, with regular and irregular outlines, and heavy and light visual weights when designing your garden's winter framework. Each tree and shrub has a characteristic brancing structure, so choose the ones that will work best in your landcape. There are deciduous trees with horizontal branches such as mimosa, redbud, dogwood, hawthorn, white oak and pin oak. There are deciduous trees with weeping branches like weeping birches, weeping hornbeams, weeping dogwoods, weeping beeches - both green and purple, weeping cherries, weeping pear and of course the weeping willows. There are pyramidal deciduous trees like birches, sweet gums, sourwoods, callery pears, and the bald cypress.
Evergreens have their different shapes also.
Evergreen trees with horizontal branches are the atlas cedar, dawn redwood, Japaneses red pine, Scotch pine, and golden larch. Evergreen trees with weeping branches include weeping cedar of Lebanon, weeping Colorado spruce, weeping white pine, weeping Douglas fir, and weeping Canada hemlock. Pyramidal evergreens to consider are English holly, American holly, eastern red cedar, southern magnolia and spruces. Striking branching patterns really come into their own in winter. Probably the best-known is Harry Lauder's walking stick, but others to think about are the corkscrew willow, the cutleaf stephanandra, doublefile viburnum, and the lower growing cotoneasters.