Pine Trees

In keeping with the holiday spirit, I decided to sit down and create some trees for the layout, specifically some pine trees.  Several years ago, I acquired three boxes of Campbell Scale Model trees that a gentleman approached me about trading for several Athearn blue box kits that I had listed for sale.  I knew nothing about these trees except that they came five to a box, with all of the materials supplied in the box.  I couldn't recall seeing these at any shows, but decided to go ahead with the trade anyway based on the reputation Campbell has for kits.  So the kits arrived and I promptly placed them on nthe modeling shelf of projects to build down the road.

I needed some evergreen trees for a corner of the layout and decided to start building my first pine tree.  The first thing I noticed was that the pine tree "sticks" were much larger than I had anticipated and larger than any other pine tree that I have on the layout.  I think that the trees are more in keeping with some western pines this week, however, as I'm going to place them in a corner and they won't be a focal part of the scene, I'm hoping that they don't stand out too much.

The foliage consists of two bags of what I believe to be air ferns.  Air fern has a delicate, airy structure as the name implies and is available through florists or garden centers. The truck of the tree consists of a pre-stained wooden dowel, with pre-drilled tiny holes in the trunk of the tree.  So it's a simple matter to insert the air fern branches cut to shape into the hole after a small amount of white glue is placed on the trunk.  Branches can be re-trimmed with an X-Acto knife or scissors as you build your tree, and most branches need some amount of trimming as the air fern seems to twist quite a bit.  

I'm very pleased with the results to date. Each tree takes about an hour to construct and trim. My only complaint is that whatever the air fern has been treated with, or maybe it's naturally like this, the smell tends to become annoying after about 30 minutes of working with them. It's some sort of moldy type of smell that I find to be distasteful. Fortunately the result is worth the temporary annoyance

Next step is to "plant" my trees.

Initial tree materials. Sorry for all of the background clutter but it's my active work bench.

Completed treet

Close up of the branch structure