Small Trees and Shrubs

I use natural flora to create trees and shrubs, mostly dead stems and flower heads of Sedum or Yarrow. I had not considered delving beneath ground to utilise plant roots for tree construction until I saw this video. (advance the video to about 2 minutes).

Pulling the weed from gravel retains the open root structure well. I also found that if the weed is dug up from soil whilst retaining a clump of earth around the root and then gently ease it away in a bowl of water then this works too. The only weed I used is chick weed, which is very common. Care in selection is necessary to choose straight stem plants as some have contorted stems.

I followed the same technique as shown in the video to prepare the root but did not bother to beef up the trunk or use the elaborate method of making foliage. I simply used a mat of Woodland Scenics foliage. This was teased out finely to give a lace like structure, laid over the branches and prodded until a desirable tree shape was formed. The foliage end of the tree was dipped in 50/50 water/PVA glue solution to fix the foliage to branches. Neat PVA was applied to the trunk and the tree popped into a previously drilled hole in the scenery.

Unfortunately, the lace like foilage structure was too fine, making the whiskery hair of the matting too noticeable. This was corrected with judicious placing of foliage clumps, that fell off the mat during teasing, and then over sprayed with sticky hair spray to fix.

This method of tree construction is ideal for small N gauge trees but for large trees I prefer the more substantial form of Yarrow or Sedum flower heads.

The photo below shows some of the trees planted along the fence line behind the Wood Store. They are of similar size and position as appearing in a photo from 1928 of the real site.

David