How many trees, does a forest make?

[FJ and G]

And if one of your trees falls and you are not near the layout, did it actually make a sound?

Some layout designs call for modeling just the trucks of trees in the foreground and then in the backgound clumping them all together and omitting the trunks, cause you can't see them through the thick canopy.

My technique is to complete all trees and not too heavily sprinkle the sawdust (or groundfoam) over them (in my case, using weeds). I like sunlight to be able to filter thru the trees.

Also, I don't cluster my trees together. Rather, I give them space; not much space, but enough space so they don't appear opaque and crowded.

But I fully realize that crowding them in the distance is actually how trees look from afar.

To each his own.

Hope I'm not barking up the wrong tree here? Or being squirrely?

Dave Vergun

[cnw1995]

I've been experimenting with how to have a forest 'effect' without having to model many individual trees - using Easter basket 'grass.' Our layout is not very high-rail though. As an aside, it was my birthday Friday, and I had previously purchased a whole bunch of inexpensive toy-train-related gifts for me to get from family members - much to their amusement...so we spent the weekend assembling a KLine airport hanger, a Plasticville shanty crossing and small freight station, a Lionel passenger platform (all so our trains have someplace to stop)., and puzzling around our newest piece of rolling stock - a B&O crane car.

[Big_Boy_4005]

Actually Dave, I call this "How to think like a tree". You are correct, an individual tree does not want to block all of the light. It wants to gather as much as it can. It does this by directing its branches out toward any available light. If you have ever looked up the trunk of a tree, there are very few leaves in the interior.

When too many trees get too close together they fight for the light, and some trees lose and die. Others will try to rise above their neighbors in the competition. Eventually a forest becomes a bunch of tree tops.

How you choose to represent a large grouping of trees may really depend on how mature you want your forest to look.

[FJ and G]

A couple additional comments:

A small grove of trees can be use if space is limited. Your mind will think "forest."

For some reason, fallen trees don't look believable on most layouts, despite fallen trees in the real world. I guess the same logic could be used for fallen people?

Trees can be effectively used to separate scenes or to hide scenes such as a harsh curve or tunnel you want hidden.

Real trees often are several times taller than the trains. However, shorter trees seem to make the layout appear larger; however, big trees are, nonetheless, cool to model. By big, I mean over 2 feet tall.

A fan can make your trees blow in the breeze and an overhead sprinkler can create a summer shower. But you may want to forego the latter.

dav

[daan]

..and an icecrusher can model a snowstorm... I prefer a few nice modelled trees abouve a bounch of those cheap wire-trees. I'm trying something with small grape-tree pieces and plastic leaves from a gadget shop.. It looks toy-trainish anyway, but quite a nice tree on the end.

[cnw1995]

Dave's comments made me review some photography of trees/forests around here - what' s interesting to me is the interplay between the distance between the taller trees and the amount of brush (including bushes, shorter trees, tall grasses) on the ground - something I certainly forget to model.