Brambles

Try this;-

Mix some PVA glue and water (about 50%50 with some dark green paint (I used some dark green emulsion but poster paint will do just as well) Mix in some fine sawdust until you get a stiff mixture then apply to your layout with a stiff brush. You can build it up to quite a height and sculpture it to suit the situation. For example it sticks nicely to retaining walls, bridge piers etc. While it is drying you can add coloured scatter for flowers or paint on some contrasting colours. After a while, you'll develop your own techniques.

Jasper

"Rob Kemp" wrote

To do brambles you need something that sticks up a bit - remember that bramble left to run riot will naturally clump at head height, and higher if it can climb scrubby trees and hedging. The best base material is a medium or coarse grade of wire wool, well teased out and rolled in paint before dibbling in scenic scatter. Old bramble (in the middle of clumps) is light brown and leafless, young has purply stalks and dark green leaves, so vary the colour and keep the scatter on the outside edge (don't dip in too deep).

Second best option is pan scourer, cheap ones ripped and teased out before the paint and scatter routine. Best are the ugly brown ones you can often find in pound shops, but the fashionable colour currently seems to be dark blue. Ripped strips of pan scourer also make good farm hedges - that is, the dense ones that get flailed regularly by the farmer so have lots of infill growth. Leggy uncut ones are better done with wire.

Consider varying the height of your undergrowth using wires or nylon bristles dipped in paint and scenic to make spikey plants like foxglove and cow parsley. Undergrowth is usually only uniformly low if it gets trampled, mown or grazed or the soil is really dry and poor, otherwise it's lush and choking, and again can be to head height (in 00 scale this means up to

25mm). Finally, remember that really lush undergrowth needs water and sunlight, so doesn't flourish fully under tree canopy or in the root radius of big trees, whereas ivy and bramble will happily colonise any surface as fully as it's left to (and ivy likes deep shade and creates more).

Use as many shades of green as you can otherwise your growth will just resemble inadequate grass, and allow for some yellowy neutrals as uncut wild growth, especially grass, always has a significant proportion of dead stuff in it even in mid-May at full growth. For ivy don't do as I once tried and think crumbled Oasis (the flower-arrangers' blocks) must be good as it's the right dark colour - it's a short-life material and tends to bleach to a soggy beige in due course.

I may be wrong (not much fern here in East Anglia, it's more a western thing) but I doubt fern and bramble grow together much, so be wary of doing too much random undergrowth as it will look unconvincing. Bramble prefers open sunny soil where it can spread, while fern thrives in damp shadier spots. Runoff ditches from trackbed cesses and the bottom edge of brick retaining walls are likely fern spots.

HTH,

Tony Clarke (country boy)