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A cherry orchard at the end of October

A sunken lane through an old orchard, where wheel ruts have pressed the fallen leaves into muddy earth. Cherry leaves are long, pointed and in autumn they color unevenly, so one branch can carry both orange and almost purple. An orchard is moreover a scene you meet rarely in modeling, and that alone gives a view a face of its own.

An autumn fruit orchard has one property worth using: the trees are low, spreading and they stand in regular rows. That creates a rhythm which leads the eye toward the back, and yet it does not block the view of the hardware or the figures. A low crown at the same time allows the detail of the leaves to be shown close up, which is not possible with tall forest trees.

Fallen leaves: on the ground they never settle evenly. The wind sweeps them to the foot of a wall, into a rut and to the edge of a ditch, while in the middle of a worn path there are almost none. They are therefore sprinkled by the handful into glue applied only to selected places and the rest is blown away.

Pressing them into mud: some of the leaves belong under the surface, not on it. It works well to draw a thin earthy material over the finished layer and to press a few leaves into it with tweezers so that they show only half way. The difference between freshly fallen and trodden leaves is what gives a scene the depth of time.

Fruit trees tend to have dry branches without leaves in the crown and often a main scaffold branch that has been propped. Details like that reveal that somebody looked after the orchard, and yet they cost nothing but a piece of wire. One prop is enough and the scene stops looking like indeterminate growth.

• The saturation of the autumn tone can be graded from orange to dark red
• A low spreading crown leaves the view of hardware and figures open
• Also suitable for early spring scenes with last year's leaves in a ditch