Going Green

The banks of my river turned greener this week with plantings of some rather odd looking trees.

Starting with my bright green grass from recent postings, trees were planted.  The glueshell is quite strong and resilient, so a hole was poked with a pushpin and then enlarged with some pointy pliers:

Note from the above that I like to lay some darker 'stuff' on the base so that when you look through the trees and bushes you don't see bright green grass underneath. This is primarily Peco dark earth scatter material that looks like old leaves and rotting wood.

Trees are then planted. I had grand plans to order some more refined items, but in the meantime have come across a few JTT editions in stock locally. These pines are a little blue in colour for my liking.

With a dob of PVA on the trunk, they are installed and assisted into a vertical position if required - there's nothing worse than leaning trees...

I like to layer my scenery - the Woodland Scenics foliage mats that can be teased out are really useful for this, and on top or around tends to be placed lumps of coarse ground foam or their Fine Leaf Foliage.  There are also a few Silflor grass clumps added, even though Switzerland itself doesn't seem to have invented long wild grasses yet. The idea is to mix it up in colour, texture and heights so that from a distance it looks natural than it does up close. All of this scenic martial is from a large box of the stuff recovered from previous layouts. Some items have seen service on three or more layouts over the past 20 years.

 And thus:

The JTT trees are reasonably priced, but I'm not crazy about them (well, not in a good way). The pines are too bluey a shade of green and the light coloured things look like cartoon cactusses. But it's a good start and doesn't look too bad from a distance.