There are countless ways to make trees for wargaming. I needed a bunch for my latest period, the Great Northern War. A lot of the battles in Russia were dominated by woods. Model railroad trees are expensive and look terrible. The following method works for 15 mm and smaller figures.

You are going to need the following materials: basing material (balsa wood, card, bass wood, etc.), nails (size depends on your figure scale), clump lichen in various colors (I use Woodland Scenics), ground turf (again, Woodland Scenics), white glue and various colors of paint: grass green, wooden brown and black. You might need some small washers too.

Follow these steps:

1. Cut the basing material to the size you want. A small piece for a single tree or a bigger piece for a group of trees.
2. Take as many nails that you want and push their points all of the way through the basing material so that the head of the nails touch the base.
3. Secure the nails with glue and let dry.
4. Paint the nails black and the base grass green. When the paint is dry, drybush the nails a wooden brown color.
5. Tear a piece of clump lichen into a tree shape and spread it out. Secure it to the tip of the nail with glue. Let dry.
6. Flock the base by applying white glue thinned downed with water. A 50/50 solution works well. Dunk the base in a box of ground turf.
7. Let dry overnight and shake off the excess flocking.
8. If the tree is wobbly, weigh it down by gluing a small washer underneath the base.

If the trees are made assembly line fashion, you can really crank them out. They are also cheap and look great.

Related Article
Yankee/Rebel Workshop: Rivers for Wargamers

This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com