The Woods and the Trees

Here's some individual trees I made around 2000, and some "wood units" built on the same concept as my village units.

The trees obviously represent the four seasons. The winter version is made using "sea foam" to produce a "twiggy" effect, whereas normally I just glue some rubberised horsehair onto a selected twig for the structure, and then glue on "leaves" made from 1mm cork granules dyed with paint. You can buy both rubberised horsehair and cork granules online nowadays, and they're not expensive. 

To colour the granules, put a little acrylic paint in a bowl, put a disposable rubber glove on your hand, pour in some of the granules and knead them together with the paint, using your gloved hand. Add granules until the paint is just enough to colour them. Tip out onto some newspaper for any further drying, but if you get this right the result is all but dry already. That's the basic method, which I'll explain more fully in a tutorial when I get that far. One advantage is that you can make darker and lighter versions of each colour which looks much more realistic than a single colour for the leaves of a tree.

With these wood units, a "perimeter" of bushes and small trees is built up around the edge of the base, which is empty within. Just a couple of independently-based trees will fill it out, or you can place figures inside, which look good defending the edge from within cover.

The figures here are my Saxon Seven Years War grenadiers (Foundry figures by Mark Copplestone), and a few WWII figures from Black Tree.