What is your favorite material to use for trees?
Do you prefer making your own from weeds, or do you use a particular tree kit like SuperTrees or Woodland Scenics kits/Ready-Made?
Tom
This is a sprig of a decorative garden plant called Seedum:
I gathered a bunch of it up after it died in the fall, separated it and let it dry out. Then I sprayed it a dark green shade, to cover the foliage. I brush-painted the trunks and branches gray. Then, I just snipped tree-sized pieces and stuck them into the layout.
Some modellers use just the branch structure, adding their own foliage with hair spray and flocking. I particularly like the “high canopy” look I get from these trees, which lets me put more trees down lower and add depth to the scene. The small trees here, by the way, are pre-made from Woodland Scenics.
There are plenty of natural materials you can find in any overgrown area, so always be on the lookout for tree material. Like the Boy Scouts walking through these woods, “Be Prepared.”
For dense background trees I use dried gyp purchased at Hobby Lobby, cover with poly fiber, spray black, dry, spray with cheap pump hair spray and sprinkle on different shades of ground foam. These give a nice Appalachian forest look but show no branch structure. I also use dried caspia, also from Hobby Lobby, tape several sections together with florist tape, paint,dry, spray with hair spray and sprinkle on ground foam. These go closer and allow nice branch structure to show. For closer trees, try candy tuff from Hobby Lobby or the Super Trees. My only issue with Super Trees is the trunks end up being way too thin for the height tree they are intended to represent. They work better, IMHO, if you wrap two or more together with green forist tape to bulk up the trunks, especially for foreground trees.
I use sedum, it gives me the most realistic trees you can imagine, I dip them in old green house paint(thinned with a bit of water) let them dry, paint the trunks gray and brown- perfect trees and the price is right and my neighbour loves to see me coming in the fall to clean up part of her yard.
For background trees, I use polyfiber balls sprayed dark green. When the paint dries, I apply a spray adhesive then coat them with WS course turf. In the past I have used a variety of colors but the more I observe real woodlands, the less color variation I see for deciduous trees. For my most recent efforts, I used Light Green and Burnt Grass. I glue these fiber balls directly to the hillside. Since the fiber balls have no structure, I use one row of WS trees at the edge of the forest. One row is all that is needed to hide the base of the fiber balls. If you had flat land or a gently slope, you might need a couple of rows. I use various sizes of the WS armatures and then use lichen to form the canopies. I then coat these with the same ground foam as the the fiber balls.
Where the forest thins out and I need individual trees, I use Super Trees. I spray these a dark brown, In some cases, I leave the stems green if I am creating a sappling. I then spray with adhesive, and apply the ground foam as before. These are by far the best looking trees and I prefer them for the foreground trees. However, because they are very brittle, I don’t use them between the track and the front edge of the layout where the inevitable clumsy elbow would break them off. I use the WS trees here which will bend but not break. Worst case is they get knocked out of the hole they were glued into.
Much of the Super Tree material is unusable because the main stem is too curved to make a realistic tree trunk. I find these scraps are an excellent source of weedy growth of various sizes. I apply ground foam if I want to give them a little foliage or sometimes just plant them as is if I want a really scruffy looking plant.
See current WPF, page 2, for examples of all of the above.
Crepe Mytrle(SP?) branches with polly fiber covered in ground foam.
Dowel rod trunks with lichen covered in ground foam.
I think this is what I use also, it grows on the side of my house (planted by the 1st owner) I spray with cheap hair spray then dust with ground foam mix.
Same ole same ole. Peter Smith, Memphis 
Hi: My favorites are Super Trees and bottle brush conifers.
I use dried goldenrod. It’s a weed that grows everywhere here.If you search " Fast, Cheap and Easy trees " a how- I -do- it thread I wrote should come up. I’d post a blue link thingy but I’m a dope with computers.
Terry
I gather twigs from the ground. When cut to the length that I want I spray them with matte finish to seal the wood. When dry I put apply some white glue on a toothpick to the branches and use Woodland Scenics foam of various colors for the leaves.
Good answers so far. I would add
Queen of the Praire, a flower, for Birch and Aspen trees.
Astibee, a flower, for tall thin Christmas tree, like Spruce.
Furnace Filter on a Stick for pine trees. This is the fastest, cheapest, easiest, way to fill a morthern forest.
I do like super trees, and Caspia in a dowel for Norway Pine.
twisted wire and sissle rope fibers, trunks are a bead of glue and fine saw dust sprinkle. I also use furnace filter. And some polyfil “lollipop” trees.
I use a number of methods, including the SuperTrees dusted with a mixture of fine WS or Noch pale green and fall color fine foam, and for evergreens (which are predominant in the type of country I’m modeling) I use everything from bottle-brush for young trees to dowels and furnace filters for taller pine and fir. Some larger fir and Ponderosa pines are made from carved, split cedar shingles and WS ‘Scenic Mats’. I’m not much after individually detailed trees, I’m more after a thick ‘foresty’ look as befits the Northern Sierra Nevada mountains of California with various sizes of trees and lots of underbrush and the occasional high-country grassy meadow.
Tom [:)]
I use sedum with a few Woodland Scenics thrown in, especially when you get close to the backdrop. I have a pretty good sized “forest” nearer to the backdrop, and those are mostly Woodland Scenics in the middle with polyfiber netting sprinkled with ground turf. It works well where you can’t see the trunks.
I have always used spraypaint, painting them all gray, then the tops green and then adding some brown closer to the bottom, but I like the idea about putting the tops in paint. I’ll have to try that sometime. Thanks.
MadSinger
The trick to making the sedum more effective is to combine several stems to create a more 3-D crown. By themselves, they look a little too much like umbrellas. Here’s a link to my tree page that gives you a little tutorial…
Here’s the results:
I also recently discovered that the Butterfly Bush in our back yard produces a nice tree armature… and lots of them!
And remember, trees are anywhere from 10 to 80’ feet tall… don’t make yours too stumpy…
Lee
I like sedum, butterfly bushes, and aggro trees.
Sue
Butterfly bushes are my favorite choice for cut timber. Peter Smith, Memphis 
Larak, that’s the one!
Thankyou!
Terry