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Your Appalachian hills are a lot like my Adirondacks, crying out for trees. I know you said that you don't want to go broke buying Woodland Scenic products, but their ground foam will go a long way to making those clumps of lichen look like trees rather than, well, like clumps of lichen. There are methods of making your own ground foam but I've never really tried them. The large WS containers will cover a lot of trees and add a realistic texture that you can't achive with bare lichen alone. For deciduous trees, I use the fiberfill method that markie99 mentioned. I use the fiber filling that I recycled out of an old pillow. (It looks like fine cotton fiber but it is synthetic.) I usually soak it in green dye overnight & let it dry completely. It doesn't really soak in and dye the fiber but it takes the edge off the white color. I then rip it into little clumps about the size of golf ball or larger. (For my N Scale layout.) Spray paint it with the cheapest Hunter Green paint I can find & drop it wet into a coffee can full of ground foam. Shake it & remove it with a pair of tongs. Set aside to dry. The ground foam makes the fiber puff bigger so plan accordingly. For dense hillsides, forget about trunks & branches & glue the resulting trees directly to the ground, using smaller & smaller trees to the rear to add to the illusion of depth. Foreground trees get detailed with trunks & branches. I've been cutting birch twigs to use but there are a number of weeds that can be harvested or purchased in craft stores that work well. I just started making evergreen trees from furnace filters, bamboo skewers & of course, ground foam. I rough up the skewers, using a sharp knife to scrape some fiber down to resemble dead branches, pre-paint them & let them dry. The filters I got were much less dense than I expected & didn't expect much from them. But I found the lacy quality of the material worked very well in creating the airy look common to real trees. The dense, solid look we see in Christmas trees doesn't really exist in the forests here in the Adirondacks. The filter material I have has a layer of fiber that forms kind of a stiff face for the rest of the fibers. I peel this off & cut the rest into a conical shape. I dip the tops of the skewers into a small cup of white glue & then through the fiber, with the pointy end down. I'll trim the trunks to length later but leaving it long gives you a handle to hold. For now, I stick the pointed ends into a piece of scrap styrofoam and let the glue dry. When dry, I spray each tree with green paint, stick it into the can full of ground foam & shake gently. Remove & stick it back into the ground foam to dry. When ready to "plant" I cut the skewer to length, leaving enough extra to go down into the foam "ground." As with the deciduous trees, I'm using larger evergreens in the foreground with progressively smaller trees to the rear. My previous layout was covered largely with the poly fiber-type trees & the new one is just the opposite, mostly huge evergreens with the deciduous trees filling in between. I'm estimating that 50 trees will cover about one square foot of hillside to provide the dense forest-look I'm after. Varying heights, with the hemlocks & pines larger than the hardwoods. I'm estimating the "proper" height of the trees because this is another case of "looking right vs. scale." Just this week I hiked through a forest near here with a magnificent stand of Eastern White Pine, covering about 10 acres with trees over 300 years old and up to 170' tall. Enormous trees for the Adirondacks and over a foot tall each if I were to try to model them in N Scale. I haven't figured out how far the first three shaker jars of foam I bought will go but when I fini***hem I'll post the results along with a picture if I can. Sometimes I wonder if I should just model the clear-cut forests of the past or the early 1900's when nearly a million acres of the Adirondacks burned. Wayne
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