Lifelike trees from natural material
Dave Spencer reveals how he created realistic trees using a blend of natural and man-made materials.
In MR286, Peter Marriott demonstrated how grape stalks, poly fibres, and leaf scatter could create convincing scale trees for around 10p each. I’ve also worked with natural materials with some success, but I’m always on the lookout for alternatives. A winter walk along the towpath of my local canal provided the inspiration to experiment with the tips of a plant that, at first glance, looked like it had considerable modelling potential.
WEED OR HERB?
A little research revealed that the plant in question was meadowsweet, a member of the rose family. Sometimes described as a weed, but regarded as a perennial herb by botanists, it grows in dense patches between 1 and 1.5 metres tall in damp (but not waterlogged) locations, such as river and canal banks. In summer, it has tight clusters of cream-pink coloured flowers. In autumn and winter, plants dry out and take on a brown-grey colour, with their tips covered with hundreds of seeds. This is the time to harvest it.
Hopefully, this project will encourage modellers to be resourceful and imaginative in their approach to landscaping and to explore ways of adapting tried and tested techniques to new situations. It’s possible to spend time rather than cash on tree-making projects and get very acceptable results – results that will show the value of skill and patience and lead to
a real sense of achievement. If you mess things up, you’ll learn from your mistakes but won’t feel you’ve wasted money.
While these trees have been created for a 4mm scale layout, the techniques could easily be adapted for other scales. I doubt whether any of my trees were produced for as little as 10p, but the overall cost of small quantities of the materials listed was a fraction of the price of good quality ready-made items of a similar size.