@rljohio Your tree isn't tending toward laying over because the trunk is being bent, it's laying over because the canopy in the wind is acting like a sail, increasing the leverage the trunk has on the root system. The soil at the top of the pot has been compressed on the leeward side and the soil at the bottom of the pot is compressed on the windward side. On the opposite side of the compressed soil, top and bottom, the soil and root mass were pulled away from the pot walls. Subsequent waterings have forced soil particles to settle into the areas where roots/soil were pulled away from pot walls to fix the tree in the new position.
IF, you attempt to turn the tree or use the wind to fix the lean w/o changing the planting angle, you'll end up with a curved trunk. Do you really want to try to straighten the tree to a more vertical orientation, even though the trunk now exits the soil many degrees off from a vertical position? Or, would you rather that the trunk exits the soil vertically AND the trunk is straight?
The fastest, simplest fix is to reorient the root/soil mass so the trunk is vertical. Once that's done, you can engineer something like this:
Above and below, a wire was wrapped around the pot as an anchor point to which twine or wire can be attached to provide stability while new roots are appropriately anchored.
Here ^^^ the wires are anchored through the drain holes and are being used to hold branches in a particular position until they 'set'. The set-up could as easily be used to hold the tree in a fixed position relative to its pot.
Al
