While doing yard work (outside) I saw a group of sedums and thought they might be potential tree material. This is a fresh cutting so when it dries out it would have to be colored. And of course the height is easily adjusted. Your opinions will be appreciated. Please excuse the background. As you can tell I’m just getting started but want to gather these plants while I can if worth while.
Thanks, Bob
I would suggest a closer picture of the item in question so the branching and structure of the plant could be seen. From the distance in the picture, it is difficult to make the call.
Don Z.
I spotted a sedum in the garden last week, and immediately laid claim to it. My wife gave me advice on drying it. Yes, those should make great trees. The same wife was about to toss some baby’s breath that had appeared in a bouquet to my daughter from her boyfriend a couple of weeks ago. The flowers had reached their limit, but once again, I grabbed the baby’s breath for trees.
I harvested a grocery bag full of those “armatures”, although they did not have the red florets…what we have up here is just a bland yellow…but I think if you clip off the florets you will have the basis for an excellent tree. Just spray tacky glue or whatever, dust with course foam or that Silfor stuff (I forget), and then spray some hair-hold over that. Joe Fugate would suggest a very light sprinkling of yellow foam or a light spritz of yellow paint to simulate sunny hilites.
I use those for most of my trees. When they’re dried, the leaves turn brown, and if you’re careful, they last without a spray; some of my trees are 3 or 4 year old now.
Here’s a photo of them.
It’s the tree in the lower left corner, there’s several more trees of that type in the photo that are more in focus though.
By far, the best looking trees I’ve ever seen are the SuperSage trees from Scenic Express. They had some on display at the National Train Show in Detroit. Amazing. Their Super Trees are pretty amazing, but the trunks and main branches were always to thin. The combination of the two plants solves that issue.
Unfortunately, they charge $110 for enough material to make ~45 Supersage trees while they charge the same amount for enough Super Tree material to make 300 to 400 trees. You could use the sedum you’ve found as armatures and add the Scenic Express Super Trees material for the fine branch structure and get pretty much the same thing.
If you have sedum growing in your area, cut the stems while the foliage is still blooming. Tie it in bunches using rubber bands and hang upside down in a garage for about a month to dry. The sedum bloom is fairly hardy once dried and can easily take a coating of hair spray or white glue if you want to change colors. Another similar plant is yarrow, which can commonly be found at very reasonable prices at places like Michael’s in the dried flower section. You could many hundreds of trees from sedum or yarrow for less than $50. For those of you in the south, don’t toss away the spent blooms from crepe myrtles either. Their structure is an almost perfect tree aramature if you use the blooms that grew straight out from the tips of branches.
Men, Thanks a lot for your replies and ideas. I’ll begin harvesting this weekend. They will have plenty of time to dry because of the time it will take before I’m ready to landscape. One of the first bits of advice I got from the forum was to have patience. Boy, have I learned that was true. Also, Jim we have a nice crape myrtle bush in the back yard just waiting for the clippers.
Regards,
Bob
I like using those. Now is about the time to cut them and hang them upside down. Leave the seed pods on untill they dry. Their weight will pull the branches down and give them a better shape.
ericboone, when I come back from the N Scale convention in Portland, Ore in 2009 I going to drop through Eastern Idaho and bring back enough Big Sagebrush material to make a thousand or more trees. All you have to do is go about 750 miles west into Western Wyoming/Central Montana and you will be in the heart of Big Sagebrush country and you can cut enough material to make thousands of trees and it won’t cost you any more than the cost of gas and lodging; it will also be a good opportunity to go through Teton and Yellowstone Nationals - don’t do your cutting until you are on your way home however.
You are going to need hedge clippers, tree trimmers, those big green garbage bags, and a couple of cans of insecticide - as soon as you get your cuttings in the bags spray them thoroughly with insecticide so you don’t haul any strange critters back to the land of nine-thousand, nine-hundred, and ninety-nine lakes.
Did you know that the U.S. Geological Survey says that Minnesota doesn’t have anywhere near ten-thousand lakes and it doesn’t even have as many as Michigan.
[#offtopic] [:-^]
Actually, I heard Michigan has 11,000 while Minnesota has 14,000. I can’t find any sources for that though. Do you have a link to a source?
Here is what I found:
http://ask.yahoo.com/20020103.html This article says Minnesota claims 11,842 lakes larger than 10 acres.
http://www.earthscape.org/t2/scr01/scr01eb.html This article says Michigan claims 11,037 inland lakes, but it says only 6,516 are larger than 10 acres.
While I live in Minnesota, I am from Michigan. If that is true, it would be a fun fact to tease my co-workers and neighbors about.
Wisconsin claims to have more lakes than Minnesota as well. The only problem is, Wisconsin considers any body of water bigger than two acres a lake. Minnesota requires a size of ten acres or more to be considered a lake.
I will back off of my quotation: I am thinking that perchance this may have been a statement made by the late Charles Kuralt on one of his On The Road CBS television ‘by-lines’ and therefore his citation may or may not have any credibility; my insertion of this subject into my response created an ‘off-topic’ and confrontational situation.
Back to the subject at hand:
I’ll bet you that I cut and burned hundreds of sagebrushes in my life but that was in my pre-model railroad days so they were just sagebrush. Growing in an area where water is likely to stand - the borrow pit just up the road from my Grandpappy’s farm outside Roberts in Eastern Idaho was clogged with the stuff and some of these plants(?) grew to a heighth that you couldn’t see over even when ahorse - they can form some rather healthy structures with trunks as much as three or four inches across and you