During my mindless quest for realistic terrain, I have experimented with many different types of materials and sources for trees and foliage. I have found that Woodland Scenics produces what I think are the best choices with respect to appearance and cost.

Woodland Scenics offers both deciduous and conifer trees in kit form at about $12.00 a kit and packages them according to size as follows:

Deciduous Trees	Conifer Trees
3/4"-3" 36ct.	2.5"-4" 42ct.
3"-5" l4ct.	4"-6" 24ct.
5"-7" 7ct.	6"-8" l6ct.

The trees are made by bending the plastic branches to shape and gluing foliage to them. I use white tacky craft glue to attach the foliage clumps to the trunks. The deciduous trees take about three applications and need about a day to dry between applications (regardless of what the glue bottle says). Typically it takes about an hour and a half to apply a layer of foliage to a bag of trees. After the trees are dry, I spray them with a matte fixative to keep them from shedding.

The deciduous trees seem to look more realistic than the conifers, and the 4"-6" conifers tend to look better than the other sized conifers.

Inexpensive micro scale trees can be made by taking two or three pieces of 24 to 32 gauge wire, bending them in half, twisting them together at the bent end, and dipping the bent end into a tube of artists acrylic paint. Allow a couple of hours to dry, flair out the loose "branches" and glue a piece of Lichen on. The "branches" are mostly hidden by the lichen and don't need to be painted.

Since I frequently battle in France during the 1940's, I have a need for hedgerows. Once again, Woodland Scenics comes through. They offer a Hedgerow kit that includes several lead trees, bushes, flocking, and two hedgerow sections that consist of a central base about 4"inches long with a series of trunks protruding from each long side. When this is painted and flocked it produces a very good looking hedgerow. The kit costs $8.00, but if you have use for the other materials, the hedgerow sections aren't so expensive.

The last item for this issue is vines. I see a lot of pictures of buildings with clinging vines and it took some time to come across this one. Take a plastic mesh dish washing pad and cut it into strips. Paint the strips green. When they dry, dip them in artists matte medium (white glue will work), then dip them in course flocking and let dry. When they are dry glued them to your favorite building and you have clinging vines.