Now I'm adding my closing thoughts.
First of all I want to apologize as the selected image was probably not best for creativity, I should have taken bit more time to find more challenging photo. Of course after I posted this and slept over it I had some better ideas.
Here is my processing, which is not very far what most of you proposed:
I used DXO for initial shadow lifting and then Nik Color Efex plugin, I think that it was Foliage Bump preset, which I modified little bit (unfortunately to my knowledge applied plugin settings are not stored so my memory might fail here). I also lightened trunk little bit to make it more attractive. There is light cloud in front of sun, making photo look like overexposed and sky losing colour, it's my main issue with this photo.