For some reason the other day i was looking at my trees on my wargames table and was overcome with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the way they looked. As a consequence i then spent a long time surfing and researching buying or constructing new woods and forests to replace my old ones. You can go down the crazy expensive route of ready made trees from some of the big scenery producers, but these will set you back in excess of $10 per individual tree. They will look good but i really could not justify $150 woods. There were also plastic armatures available which you then construct, but these looked unnatural and fake in my opinion, and were not too cheap either. Then i read numerous tutorials on twisting wire into trees and covering with flock and foliage, or buying seafoam and doing the same. Even buying seafoam was going to cost me $50 before i had even created one tree. So every direction i turned looked financially unacceptable or too time consuming for my marginal patience levels. Time is money apparently.

As quite often happens in life, i ended up going full circle, right back to where i started, and dug out a pack of trees i had bought on eBay from Hong Kong or China somewhere. For $10 dollars, delivered to my door including postage, you can buy ten to fifteen trees, depending on height. Their colour was a little too martian or goblin green, so i sprayed them a dark foresty green to dull them down a bit. I then gave them a brushing with PVA glue and dipped them in some more coarse green flock. Then another coat of green spray paint to blend things in. This also keeps all the flocking on. The trunks and visible branches were painted brown and i mounted the trees onto randomly shaped MDF bases in groups of four to six. I added some modelling clay to the bases where each tree was to grow, so it was built up a little and meant there was more depth of base to insert the tree into. After covering the bases in sand and gravel and more green flock, i drilled a hole for each tree and glued them in.

So really i came to the conclusion that the best solution was to keep buying super cheap trees from China, but spending a little more time sprucing them up. For less than one dollar a tree you cannot go wrong. I think i need to make a walled apple orchard or maybe some lemon trees for my village…..