It is all too common in life not to be able to tell the forest for the trees. But on the wargame table, I've noticed, one is more likely to find the opposite situation - not being able to see the forest for the lack of trees. I've confronted this vexatious problem myself on many an occasion, dismayed at the cost of fielding a forest as well as an army. I have a nice army, well painted and detailed, with buildings to match, so naturally I wanted my trees to be on a par with all the rest. But decent looking trees are expensive and excellent trees are astronomically expensive.
Figure 1: Grape stem trunks w/commercial kit foliage.
Naturally, I am constantly on the look-out for suitable materials from which realistic trees can be fabricated. For along time I collected weeds in the hopes that they might provide reasonable trees. But the hopes were always greater than the reality and I have only a few trees that started life as weeds. Once when a large roll of very fine wire fell into my hands, I attempted to twist varying lengths of it into trees. I soon discovered that while it was possible, it was a devilishly tricky and time consuming task--too much so to be a sensible way of creating a forest.
Then one day while eating some grapes and thinking of nothing in particular, I plucked the last grapes from the stem, held the stem up and said to myself: hmm, that looks an awful lot like a tree trunk. I set the stem in the sun to dry and several days later glued it to a base, spread glue over the ends of the projecting stems and pressed some left-over foliage from a commercial tree kit over the ends of the grape stems.
Figure 2: Grape stem trunks w/lichen.
Figure 3: Winter trees - root clippings.
After painting the trunk and the base, the result was a very respectable tree shown in Figure 1, with a 25mm figure for size comparison. Figure 2 shows other examples of grape stem trees with lichen for foliage. I found that the problem of applying glue to the grape stems can most easily be solved by using 3M General Trim Adhesive for auto trim. While it is a little expensive, it is available at most auto parts stores and for the purpose of "forestation" will last virtually forever. For foliage, lichen remains an ever reliable possibility as does commercial foliage available at most hobby stores.
The success of my grape stem trees encouraged me to keep my eyes open for other possibilities. It was while bringing in a supply of wood for the wood stove early in the fall that I spied some pieces of tree roots with their extensive network of tendrils. My, my, I exclaimed to myself, how those bits and pieces do resemble winter trees. Back to the work table with a handful of root clippings and the results were the winter copse shown in Figure 3. Since then, I've scavenged enough root clippings to create a wide array of fall and winter trees for my battlefields.
With these two techniques, I've found that I can field a very respectable forest at a very reasonable price. The trees are not only good enough for the wargame table, but for dioramas as well. And best of all, in so far as the grape stem trees are concerned, this is a rare instance of the fruit preceding the tree.
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