Hickory

A hickory as the dominant feature of a front garden

The hickory is a hard broadleaf tree whose wood has always been prized for tool handles and for firewood. In nature it grows in mixed stands across most of the climatic belts of North America, but just as often people planted it along suburban streets, where it is to shade the sidewalk and the front of a house. The crown is tall and fairly compact, so the tree does not take up as much room sideways as its height would suggest.

One tree in the package

In the package you will find a single tree 13.6 cm tall. It is the tallest tree of this selection, and it is finished and colored through, so building and toning fall away.

Placement

A tall lone tree needs something beside it for scale, otherwise it looks merely like a big tree with no context. Place it by a house, by a fence or by a vehicle, so that the viewer reads its height off the surroundings. In a narrow street it works to move the trunk off the axis of the view so that the crown does not cover the whole facade, whereas on the open area of a yard the tree may stand in the middle as the natural center of the subject.

Given its height it is suitable for scenes in HO and in N, where it stands in for an adult tree beside buildings. In larger scales it will serve as a tree in the background, with the viewer assuming that its crown carries on above the upper edge of the scene. Under the trunk it is good to acknowledge the shade of the dense crown, because a hickory lets only a little light reach the ground.

A single tree in the package has a practical advantage too: you can try it out in several places in the scene before fixing it, and decide according to where the viewer's eye is led. With multi-piece packages that deliberation is harder, because the trees are judged in relation to one another.