Locust

A black locust with an open crown

The locust is a hardy tree that makes do even with poor soil and quickly takes over field boundaries, embankments and abandoned ground. Its crown stays thin and airy, light passes between the small leaflets and the shade under the tree is never completely dark. In the American landscape it is to be seen along the edges of fields and in belts of trees between plots, where nobody tends it and yet it holds on.

Box contents

Two pieces are supplied, one 7.6 cm tall and the other 4.4 cm. The smaller one stands in for the younger specimens that grow up from root suckers beneath an older tree, which is typical of this species. Both trees are finished and colored through.

Use on a diorama

An open crown has an advantage that dense trees do not: it lets whatever stands behind it show. Place the locust by a low wall, by a fence or behind a parked vehicle, where it is to frame the subject and not cover it. It also looks good on the slope of a railroad embankment or in a belt of greenery between two fields, that is wherever a regularly planted avenue would look out of place.

Uncut grass and low bushes suit the ground under the trunk, because dense herbaceous cover usually grows around a locust. The heights given match a medium-grown tree in the sizes HO and N, and the smaller piece can also be used as bushy growth at the edge of a scene.

The pair can also be split between two different places without the scene losing its coherence. The locust appears scattered through the landscape, so two free-standing trees on opposite sides of a base look more natural than a tight group of them in the middle.