Sea Foam

On 12/9/2007 2:58 PM Michael Briggs spake thus:

I assume you're talking about ground foam (rubber) here. The stuff is available at any decent hobby store (or used to be). You can also make it yourself by grinding foam rubber (in a meat grinder--no fooling) and dyeing it with Rit dyes. Makes great ground cover, trees, any kind of foliage.

Believe Woodland Scenics has it in a wide range of colors.

We may be talking about two separate things, but sea foam (artemisia versicolor) is a small plant which might be suitable for model foliage. In some perfunctory googling, I came upon Plants Select which provides sources for this and other types of ground cover. HTH.

Jerry

versicolor) is a small plant which might be suitable for model foliage<

Real growing plants on a MRR is not a good idea. If you can dry it and use it then that will work ok.

Agreed. What I meant to say was that Mr. Boggs' letter might be referring to something of vegetable origin rather than ground rubber. (Oh dear, ground rubber is of vegetable origin, too.) Still, I will try to be more clear in the future. For the present permit me to simply state that I do not advocate plowing the plaster or styrofoam to sow any kind of crop. Buy the plant, dry the plant, use the plant. Thank you.

Jerry

A little more diggind and I came across a site which says that when the plant is dried, it makes an excellent basis for winter boquets. This tells me that it may very well have some potential for trees. I'd like to see some though as most descriptions suggest that it grows to over 18" in height. That would make for some "tall cotton" on my HO scale layout. : )

At the Toledo train show, there was a guy there with some pretty good looking trees that he had made himself. He wasn't really charging all that much for them either. He claimed that he made them from "a plant in his back yard," but was pretty tight-lipped about just what that plant was. My only problem with them was that they did look a little short... Maybe only about 3" tall maximum.

dlm

Try naturally dried Goldenrod trimmed to shape with a scissors and then sprayed lightly with a couple of shades of green (or yellow or red for fall - carefully strip off the "fuzz seeds" for winter). Can't beat the price! Size varies as you wish. Make forests if you want.