Home made Bocage/dense hedgerow 20-28mm

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Off I pottered to my local model railway store, hoping to score a few bits for the 20mm WW2 set up.  I found to my (very mild) horror that the long standing bastion of cheap terrain for gaming, Javis has stopped manufacturing its venerable hedgerow; the one GW used to repackage and charge twice the price for!

Hey, I used to be expensive, yet you still bought me...

Flummoxed, I looked at the alternatives, and they were all pretty crappy - square green foam strips of a very regular size, and only half an inch or so tall. Fine for a trimmed garden, but no good for a centuries old French farm boundary.  A radical solution would be required; given that I wasn't going to pay for some of the very nice, but expensive, alternatives from the various terrain companies out there...

I formulated a quick solution, basically I'd make my own and try at least to make them superior to the alternatives, whilst not being too expensive.  As a start, I picked up a pack of Woodland Scenics' Clump Foliage:

About £7

 This would provide the base for my plan.  But there was some legwork to do first.

Modern French Bocage

Historical training diagram...

So one obvious point, that escapes no WW2 wargamer or historian, is that Bocage is freakishly big.  It certainly didn't escape allied training manuals as you can see above.  Very few model hedges even approach the scale, or the randomness, of such terrain.  Not even what is presented below, as it lacks a tree every twenty feet; but I do my best.

To kick off, the hedges would need substantial earthen banks, which I made by taking two layers of 5mm thick foam core - roughly 4cm/1.5inch wide - and carving to a steep angle.

Well camouflaged here

On top of these I added card templates.  In this case each section is 15cm/6inch long and was initially drawn onto cereal box card; the pattern is simply a bushy, cloudlike one, anybody should be able to draw it!  Cutting them out with scissors is another matter.  Small support struts of foamcore can be seen above to help the card stand up straight once glued to the centre of the earthen banks.

Airbrush action 

Next I gave everything a black spray undercoat.  Thereafter I realised I needed to seal and texture the banks, which was easily done with some cheap tile filler.  The benefit of tile filler is low cost and water solubility.  Two thinned down coats of filler were painted roughly on to the whole, the latter with a bit of extra roughening done as it dried with a stiff brush.

Once this was done I painted the banks with dark brown craft store acrylic, and then drybrushed them up to an acceptable texture.

So far a clean process  

Now it is time to apply the foliage.  The trick here is a simple, but slow, and incredibly messy one; time for a disposable pot, lots of PVA glue, a little water and our clump foliage.

It's about to get OCD grim 

After a lot of experimentation, I concluded that about a 5-1 mix of PVA to water, made for a thin-ish goo into which torn-up bits of clump foliage could be mixed.  Then the only really effective way to apply this to the card forms proved to be by hand.  Not this writers favourite method, but it worked the best.  

Work on only one side of the form at a time, by which I mean it will need to dry completely before working on the opposite side.  This in my experience took several days, as that foam holds a lot of moisture. Lay each side flat and face up to dry unless you want a lot of the foliage to fall off while you are absent.  Once dry the composition will be pretty darned tough.

As part of the process gaps are fine as only the black core of the hedge will show through, as an advantage, different thicknesses of hedge can be built up.

Once both sides have been done, you will have something a bit like this.

Time for some corrections 

A final pass can now be made, with smaller pieces of foliage prepared in the same way, to cover the 'seam' along the centre of the hedge, and fill any particularly egregious gaps.  Once this was dry, I gave the foliage two successive dry-brushes of yellow green paint, to dapple some light on the leaves.  and then finally added some static grass to the banks for texture.

The net result is pretty reasonable, and presents a pretty natural looking country hedge, suitable in this build for 20mm or 28mm gaming.

  

I made 6 strips in this pass, but there was a fair bit of foliage remaining, and so I think one bag could make eight 15cm/6inch sections with ease.  I intend to make some more with farm gates or other passing points at a later point.

20mm Germans for scale

As to the time I've alluded to, it's mainly the hanging around for things to dry that meant these took three weeks to assemble.  Cost wise, it was mostly scrap other than the foliage pack; it did use a lot of PVA too, but that was cheap craft store product.  I think for about £10-15 ($12-18) it would be possible to make 8-10 pieces on this scale.

Well, that's all for now.

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