Track and yard vegetation

[topcopdoc]

Since I am modeling a Northeast railroad I want to include vegetation that is found around many railroad tracks and yards. One common plant is the Fragmitie, which grows near water. They are tall reeds with a billowy tail on top. Not to be confused with the Cattail. Large areas of these are referred to as meadowlands. 

 

They are much taller than field or prairie grasses. In HO they would be about 8 feet which is 11/8” to 1 ¼” high and are a straw color. I would like to know if anyone has scratch built these or where I could buy some.

 

Thanks Doc

[Kurt_Laughlin]

Doc, I don't know how different Fragmities are from cattails, but there have been several articles published on modeling the latter.  Check the magazine index on this site using the keyword cattail.

KL

[topcopdoc]

I saw the Cattail project but that is not what I am looking for. Fagmities are 8-10' high staw colored reeds with a large seed tail on top. Cattails have green shoots 4-6' high with brown punks on top.

Doc

[nbrodar]

I know what your talking about.   I haven't seen anything about modeling them.

You might want to try taking some broom straws and dipping the tops in ground foam.  Or you could try long fake fur.

Nick

[Leon Silverman]

Since you want to model vegetation in an around railroad yards in the Northeast, you could have a clump of these weeds growing out of a Maintenance-of-way gondola parked on a siding.  I saw this while riding a NJTransit train into Manhatton.  The gondola was parked on a siding near the Newark, NJ station.  I gues that train isn't used very often.

NJ Pineland resident.

[chutton01]

But you should be searching for "phragmites", which gets you 3 magnitudes more hits on google than fragmites...

 

Looking here:

http://www.kbinirsnb.be/cb/antelopes/flora/phragmites.jpg

http://aquat1.ifas.ufl.edu/phraus2.jpg

http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/Tree_of_life/plants/magnoliophyta/magnoliophytina/liliopsida/poaceae/phragmites/australis-1x.jpg

Well, the top is definitely a dip into brownish ground foam, but the plant body, with a slender tan/brown stalk and long narrow green leaves, hmm, that's a problem - considering you'd need hundreds to effective model even the smallest marsh.  I seem to recall the cattails modeling project was usuallyl a cattail wire stalk, dipped in foam or whatever for the top and painted, stuck in a section of reeds (fake fur?) - did they ever develop easy modeling techniques for stalks w/ leaves which say didn't involve lots of tedious gluing/wrapping of strips of leaves to a stalk?

[Milwhiawatha]

Basic yard and track vegetation is grass, tall weeds, prarie tuffs (small clusters of grass) check out ny post as Pictures of what I did this weekend.

[orsonroy]

I ran into a similar problem, in how to effectively model bullrush and tiger lillies, both very common here in the wetter parts of Illinois. I finally realized that you didn't need to create museum-quality models of each individual plant, but rather the IMPRESSION of reality.

So I made both similarly to how cattails are made, which is basically the stem, leaves and a flower head. The stem is the easiest part: thin wire (I use floral wire, which is a bit too thick, but cheap and almost the right color). Lillies are short (3 feet or less) while bullrush is long (up to 10 feet). For the flower heads, I dipped the lilly stalks in Woodland Scenics fine orange and yellow flocking, while the rushes got a dip in Busch 2mm tan static grass. Finally, leaves proved problematic, until I tried floral tape, and shredded it lengthwise to make long, thin, pointy leaves. Again, the lillies got shorter ones, while the rushes got longer. Stick a few leaves onto the bottom of each stalk, point them upwards (and curve the lillies), and stick them in the ground. 

When planting clumps of plants, be sure to save the best for the foreground edge plants, while burying your earlier, crider attempts in the background crowd. 

Yes, individually scratchbuilding lillies is a time-consuming effort, but I tackle it in steps. I keep the material I need in a small tote in the TV room, and work on a few plants at a time while watching the tube. Eventually, you'll have enough to populate a large swamp!