Arboreal Adventures

This layout is going to require trees, thousands of them. Now on my past layouts, I've used Woodland Scenics trees. However, those layouts were also a fraction the size of this one and those trees ain't cheap. So, not wanting to take it in the shorts financially, I saught out a cheaper way to make trees. 

After scouring the web, I found a lot of meathods for tree making that looked good, but were a ton of work. I found some that were easy but produced crappy results. Then about two issues of Model Railroader ago, there was an article on making trees out of goldenrod.

"Well hey!" I thought. "Goldenrod grows everywhere around here!"

Basically, what you do is wait for the flowers to go to seed, which happens around early November here in South Carolina. Then you clip off the the tops, trim them into a tree shape and according to the article, dip them in oil paint. Instead of oil paint, I opted to use spraypaint. Below is the result.

Goldenrod trees, painted from left to right, Krylon "Hunter Green" Wal Mart Green, and  Krylon "Jade."

Since I didn;t wnat a monochromatic forrest, I opted for three shades of green. I used Krylon "Hunter Green," Krylon, "Jade" and Wal Mart green.I imagion I'll spray the majority of the trees with the Wal Mart green since it's $1.50 per can and used the $4.00 per can Krylon for accent trees.

Finished trees at Horseshoe Curve.

The trees look alright on their own. However when clumped together densly in a forrest, they look quite good. I'm very happy with how these turned out and happier still they only cost a few pennies apiece to make. However, now I know why desert-themed layouts are so popular!