1:35 Listí bříza

A birch grove above a trench

A thin stand of birches on the edge of a marsh, a corduroy road of logs between the trunks and the wheel of a truck caught in it. Birch is a tree that grows literally everywhere on the Eastern Front, and its white trunk with dark marks is the strongest vertical line that can be stood on a diorama. Dry leaves beneath it then settle the whole view into October, when the rains begin.

A birch leaf is small, almost triangular, with a doubly serrated edge and on a long thin stalk. Its very smallness is an advantage for a modeler: at one to thirty-five it comes close to the size the eye reads as an individual leaf rather than as an indistinct blotch. At the same time it sprinkles easily even into the dense parts of a crown.

The white trunk: a birch is not white all over. From the bottom the bark is cracked and dark, higher it turns cream and only in the top third is it really light. The horizontal marks are painted one at a time with a fine brush and should not form a regular pattern.

A thinned crown: by autumn a birch has already lost half its leaves, so the density should be lower than on a summer tree. It pays to sprinkle the leaves only onto the ends of the twigs and to leave the inside of the crown bare. You can see through a tree like that and the scene behind it opens up.

Birch grows in clusters and only rarely as a solitary tree. It therefore works best as three trunks of unequal height set close together, with the thinnest of them leaning slightly. A regular spacing and the same height are the two most common mistakes that make a stand look like a planted avenue instead of a self-seeded grove.

• Suitable for corduroy roads, marshes and trench positions
• Dry leaves also work well as bedding between logs
• The modeler makes the load-bearing armature from wire or from rootlets