What trees should wargamers choose?

Choosing trees can be difficult for wargamers as many are sold with either a cautious suggestion of a model railway gauge (which means little to anyone other than a railway modeller) or worse still, no indication of scale at all!

That may seem like a sloppy or lazy effort on behalf of the manufacturers, but the truth is, trees are difficult to accurately pigeonhole into a scale because no one can answer how big a real tree is. And if they did, the information would be obsolete after another year's growth. The other issue is that what is a large tree in a small scale is simply a smaller tree in a bigger scale.

So where does that leave wargamers?

Well, some manufacturers such as Woodland Scenics have had great success concentrating less on gauge and more on actual measurements. The sizes of their trees are clearly printed on the packs and are generally included in their listings too, so look out for these and similar products.

Alternatively, you can get an idea of which railway gauges are similar to your wargame scale by comparing figure heights, that way, you will know which model railway gauge to source your trees from. To help with this, here is a list of average figure heights for various gauges of model railways:

• N gauge = Average figure height of 10mm
• OO gauge = Average figure height of 20mm
• O gauge = Average figure height of 40mm
• G scale = Average figure height of 80mm

Of course, the scale of trees is still subjective, and as mentioned earlier, many manufacturers are reluctant to commit to a scale or gauge, so you are likely to now have slightly more choice as opposed to a complete solution, but at least it gives you a rough idea. At the end of the day, you probably want to go for what feels right rather than what is totally accurate.