How I Made My Sagebrush Trees

A couple of years ago I started to pursue the task of making trees for my layout. I did not want plastic-looking trees. I wanted the look of real wood and figured the best way to get that would be with, well, what else but real wood. I scoured the internet looking for tutorials and such and in those searches I found some images of trees which had been made from sagebrush:http://www.fsmtrees.com/images7/finishedTree2.jpg
http://ryan.skow.org/tutorials/trees/pics/treeCloseup.jpg

Sagebrush is "a coarse, hardy silvery-grey bush with yellow flowers and grows in arid sections of the western United States and Western Canada."

This is exactly what I was looking for but, living on the East coast, obtaining sagebrush to work with is very difficult (it does not grow locally and I did not want to buy pre-packaged items due to the cost). So I figured I would have to resort to Plan-B and shortly thereafter I found another source for trees which I will write about in the near future. Recently, however, I realized that a friend had moved to New Mexico...New Mexico has tons of sagebrush...this friend is a good friend...hum...2 weeks later the mail man brings me a large box of...can you guess?  Yup!  SAGEBRUSH!!!

Using the Sagebrush Tree Tutorial as a basis for my implementation, here is what I did...

First a couple of pics of the sagebrush as I opened the box.

I grabbed a branch and a pair of wire cutters and got to work.  Inspecting the branch I selected smaller-sized "sub-branches", ones that looked about the size of tree I wanted, and clipped them off.  Sub-branches which had interesting bends, twists, and other unique characteristics won out over regular looking ones. 

The sagebrush was green when it was shipped to me (e.g. not "dead" wood) so there was some leaves which I did not want on my tree (as shown above). Given that, and the fact that these were still "live" items, I decided to dry them out so I baked them in the oven at 300 degrees for about 15 minutes. This would not only dry out the natural leaves it would also kill off any bugs and dry the branches out.  Be warned - there might be a lot of smoke that comes out of the oven and an extreme smell that might bother some people so do this when you can have doors and windows open.  I placed them on a cookie sheet and in the oven they went.

After they came out of the oven I knocked off the baked leaves and had twigs remaining. 

The approach I will take for "planting" these trees is to make a hole the size of the trunk and glue the tree in place (as opposed to placing a pin in the base of the tree as my guide tutorial instructed).  Taking this approach into account, I was sure you cut a trunk long enough to allow part of it to be buried in the ground of the layout.

Before I go any farther let me give a run-down of the rest of my supplies. First is cheep hairspray and some poly fiber.  The Suave hairspray came from Kmart and was about $2.00 for the can and the fiber was some I had purchased some time back while attending a model train show.  I do not recall the cost.  This particular fiber is brown which, I felt, would be a good color to use (as opposed to green).

Here is a close-up of the fiber.  I looks kind of like steel wool.

For the tree's foliage I used some Woodland Scenics' products.  On the left is their blended turf, in the middle is an older bag of a darker green turf, and on the right is their Earth product.

I started by pulling off small chunks of fiber:

Then, using tweezers, pulled each chunk apart into a larger ball shaped piece:

I then place the tree in my Sagebrush Tree Holder of Science (nods to Bill Nye the Science Guy).

I take one of the balls of fiber and stretch it over a lower branch (it is better to start with the lower branches and work your way up).  I did not put a lot of effort into securing it to the branch - just stretch it over and wrap some fibers around to help hold it in place.

After placing all of the fiber it may not look quite right and your gut may tell you that you need to add more and to make it look 'better'.  Fight the urge to do so.

Take the tree and spray it with the hairspray.  Spray from a distance, arm's length, so that the strength of the spray will not knock the fiber off and spray enough so that beads of liquid form on the fibers.

Now it is time to apply the foliage.  First I held the tree upside down and sprinkled a light dusting of the brown Earth onto the underside of the fibers.  Second I held the tree upright and gave it a sprinkling of the darker green foliage onto the tops and side of the fibers.  Lastly, I gave it a lighter sprinkling of the light green foliage onto the tops of the fiber clusters.  It is important to note - do not apply too much.  You should be able to see through the fiber clusters.  Here are several shots showing my results up to this point:

When done with the foliage, I gave it a final light covering of hairspray to hold everything in place and set it aside to dry.

Once the hairspray had dried I took a sharp pair of scissors and clipped off any wild fiber strands that did not look right (some of those wild ones are visible in the photos above).

I was excited about how good the final product looked and it took very little time to do.  Actually, this is one of those tasks that you can do while watching TV because (1) it requires little attention and (2) being distracted by the TV are you giving it little attention to the trees and are less apt to try to hard to make it too 'right'.

I will post more pics when I get them.  Meanwhile how about some behind-the-scenes shots?  Here are a couple of random pics I took while making the trees.  First, my photography area:

And my work bench: