Making Tall Jungle Trees



Making Tall Jungle Trees

 

 



When I was on holiday and when I have visited tropical botanical gardens I was struck by how high some of the jungle trees can be. Many of them seem to grown straight up with little or no foliage until they breach the jungle canopy where they then sprout into growth. Whilst I am very happy with the jungle terrain that I have created I wondered how I might produce a small number of such really tall trees to bring a real sense of depth to my terrain. So, here is how I went about this project.

Raw materials were several sprays of plastic plants form the local garden centre and a number of lids from empty jam and pickle jars. As you can see from the following photograph I was after plants or sprays which had little or no foliage but which also branched out at the top.

The next step was to strip off all the flowers and leaves which were put to one side for other projects. This just left the bare stem which was to become my tree trunk:

I then punched a hole through the centre of a jam jar lid and threaded the stem through it. One it was through I made a right angled bend in the stem, this would be used to help glue it in place later:

I now took two short lengths of thick wire and made right angled bends on one end - again to help gluing the trunk in place - and wound them round the trunk to hold it upright:

Once I was happy that the trunk would stand upright I moved on to the glue gun and squirted a liberal amount of hot glue on to each of my two right angled bends to hold the trunk in place:

Finally I squirted another good blob of hot glue inside the base to hold the right angled bend that I had made on the plant stem:









That was the first stage of the process completed and I retired to the garage to start the messy process of filling and painting the bases.

 

I used ready-mixed polyfilla and simply filled each jam jar lid with the stuff and then left them to dry. As the layer of filler was quite thick it took a couple of days to dry out completely; I could them stand the tree trunks up and spray paint them:

 

 

 

Once they had dried I was able to set up the hot glue gun again and attach chunks of reindeer moss in a random pattern and the job was done:

 





 

 

Here are a couple of views of the finished product surrounded by some of my jungle stands and set off with a suitable backdrop: