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Noémi Ferenczy was interested in the philosophical interpretation of the relationship of man and nature all her life and how it could be expressed in art. Her tapestries emphasized the beauty and importance of nature while man was depicted as small and frail. Later, she expressed man's dependance on nature, figures had a stronger stress on form, and contemplation was substituted with activity and work. Figures of gardeners, wood-cutters and people gathering brushwood occasionally fill her narrow tapestries upright and nature is only referred to. The wood-cutter of "Mouldy Tree" does not symbolize labour only in general. She defines work by removing symbols of disease and destruction from those of healthy life.
The skeleton of her composition is formed by two figures of about the same importance: the wood-cutter and the trunk of the punk wood which meet in the vertex of an equilateral triangle. The trunk is highlighted by the tree in full bloom behind it which is leaning in the same direction. The two white-grey-brown forms are clearly separated from the purplish-red background. Branches without leaves fill the picture. It is full of flowers of large petals simply drawn. By placing flowers next to one another, Noémi Ferenczy closes space and by depicting other motifs in two dimensions, she asserts plainness, a major law of tapestry.
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