Last August I posted about progress with scenery around my junk yard area. I did some thinking about trees that might establish the area is in California, and I watch a YouTube channel, SoCal Scale Models, where in one episode Rick, the host, explained how he orders ready-made Chinese plastic palm trees off Amazon. He shows what he does in this YouTube:
While I generally prefer eBay to Amazon for stuff like that, I went looking on eBay and found this 18-piece set. What set it apart from many other palm tree models, including the ones Rick used, was that they look like a very common local California type, fan palms, that have fan-shaped fronds and a "beard" of old fronds hanging down from the live ones at the top. These arrived quickly at a very reasonable price. I touched them up with paint I had on hand from rattle cans and brushed acrylics to make them look a little less plastic.
Here's a prototype photo of Washingtonia filifera. The size of the "beards" seems to depend on how often the trees are trimmed and how old they are.
And here's a grove of fan palms along the BNSF at a location called Stoil in the San Joaquin Valley. I'll probably use the smaller trees in the set that are closer to N scale on a T-TRAK module.
There are little swaths of white on the bases of my model trees, because I had just planted them with some Hobby Tac that hasn't dried yet.
