To achieve a better depth of field effect I decided to create a montage in photoshop (background).  After that it was time to work on the tree itself. I wrote an implementation of the space colonization algorithm in VEX inside of Houdini. 

Using the algorithm I created an HDA that can spawn trees out of basic line shapes.  The growth animation was then handled by a shortest path growth inside a SOP solver along the original shape. 

The smoke for the incense was created using the pyro solver.  I then exported all the assets into Blender and rendered it there with a matching depth of field.