One of the key pieces of Hemerdon will be the wooded area that runs from the farm house to the end of the passing loops and one of the things I did not consider when choosing Hemerdon as a layout idea was how on earth was I going to cover the area with trees. I guess in my mind I though it would not be that expensive to buy them - wrong on so many levels.

Gven that I need around 150 trees to cover the area, and decent tree is between £3 & £4 I could have spent between £450 and £600 which was not a sum I had thought of when planning the layout, and more importantly is not a sum which will get past SWMBO.

So that leaves me with a clear option of making them for myself. Hmmmmmm. How the heck do I do that, and how do I do a silver birch compares to the more generic bush trees on the site. The silver birch is much finer and means I will need to work out how to paint the distinctive off white trunk with the odd dash of darker brown that peaks through evey so often.

Luckily I am finally getting the hang of searching this little beasty of a web site and there is some great stuff on here.

My initial starting point has been the fact I have a load of single core copper wire so I have been playing around with this and my scenic test piece to create some trucks of different forms.

One key conclusion I have come to is that the copper wire is fine for the main trunk, but I need something finer for branches, so an idea I am going for is to mix in some picture wire for the branches along with either some static grass for really small twigs or chopped up twizel string. Will see how this goes.