N is for National . . . Tree Week!

Yes loyal readers, it's National Tree Week - if you live in the UK (if you live elsewhere it's probably National Something-else Week?) - and the various parties currently competing for power in our General Election spent the weekend arguing over who was planning on planting the most trees! I think the highest bid was 40-million, by Boris, but you know that's a lie!

The National Tree Week people what us to plant 1-million between us, which should be doable, there's about 68-million of us so one in every sixty-eight citizens need to plant a tree in the next twelve months?

As covering the whole of the British Isles in trees wouldn't undo what's been lost in the Amazon this year, it's all rather academical, but you should plant trees because they're nice!

Anyway . . . by way of a bit of gratuitous band-wagoning; here are some trees!

Lego flats! But Lego from the 'acceptable age', that is the age before that pesky Small Scale World bloke reminded us all they are rip-off, corporate, plagiarist pirates, and before they apparently set out to cover the whole planet (including its oceans) in four-centimetres of plastic bricks!

The early set (upper shot) were stand-alone trees with small, flat-bottomed bases, and six designs produced seven trees by the expediency of painting-in flower-candelabra in red on some but not all of the horse-chestnuts. The later set (lower shot) had bases which griped the studs on baseboards, or the studs on spaceships - Lego is pretty flexible that way!

A couple of the latter set's trees were redesigned, and 'big round tree' was one of them, as was the hedge - they were given more lumps!

There is a minor variation on shade with the firs, but it's not as marked as with some of the other trees, while Samsonite had a franchise in the USA for a while and produced the middle tree in the upper shot, it's the standard tree, given two slats which lock-on to the studs and may have led to the second full-version coming to life? They treated the hedge (below) in the same way.

I ought to be able to tell you who made the two vague copies (lower left) as I have them on the dongles somewhere, but I'm buggered if I can find them, they came with a large boxed play-set of erzgebirge type stuff if memory serves, and while these are a little different from the Lego sculpt; the same name may be responsible for a couple more down the page.

The modern ones are actually quite cartoony, but equally more Lego'y! the early designs had sharp edges and although softish polyethylene and pretty innocuous, they were nevertheless redesigned with rounded extremities.

The small fir was the first to receive the kinder tips, and - as far as I know - there are no hard-edged versions, however when the two full sized trees were re-done, a second version of the little one appeared, also (as per the two full-sized trees) slightly taller than its predecessor.A forth design is a Lombardy Poplar, but I may not have one, or it is somewhere else!

The Lombardy poplar was softened in the clip-on tranche with the loss of the 'sand-tex' finish. It is also the most pirated of all the Lego trees, but all the piracies are in other tubs, in another crate out in the garage so we'll have to look at them properly another day! China firms are still using various sub-generation of this tree today, and one or two have been cobbled together below - final image.

On the right; touring in France, before they cut them all down to save the lives of drunk drivers . . . I would have put concrete blocks round their bases, after a decade you'd have had a leaner population with no drink drivers and you could remove the blocks!

The horse chestnut; in the upper shot are the basic versions with the two modern 'big-round tree', below are more variations of the early flat-base version. However, the two to the bottom left may not be Lego at all, and may - in point of fact - be either the same maker as the firs above, or another maker all together?

Both are finer, busier sculpts, but both are the same colours as the known Lego trees? A true HK copy is in the final image below.

The boring ones! Although the hedges are very useful for war-games scenery as you can build quick lines of natural obstacle from them, and in 1:330 type mirco-armour gaming each make a nice stand of trees or a coppice.

Note; the far right birch is also by another maker, possibly the same maker as the two look-alikes (firs and chestnuts) above? And there's a related hedge from Wing Luen below.

Between the flats and the full-on polyethylene lumps, there was a short-lived pair (I think it was only ever the two shapes . . . did they do a hedge; they may have done the hedge too?) where plastic granules in green were attached to formers or 'armatures' in brown polymer.

These were from the cellulose years, so acetone is the best solvent, useful, as they are hard to find, and when found have usually lost some of their granules which will be found scudding about in the bottom of their container.

But note that the conifer has large granules, while the 'deciduous' has smaller granules, I have a part-fir in small granules so assume both/all three came in either format. I'd imagine the parental swallowing-fear of granules which came lose, or could be prised-off, often in multiple-granule lumps, hastened their short life?

Mega Bloks came to my attention with a range of large (8/12-inches) dinosaur 'big-box' models (long before Lego did dinosaurs), which came in lovely shades of purple, brown, dark mauve, khaki and various greens (long before Lego offered such colours) and the shrub in front/to the left here, came in those sets.

The Lego grass tussock also has some age now, and is here to compare, as a red one (or other colours); it's sea-weed, or - I think - it was used as an alien planet's shit at one point? There's loads of greenery in Lego's inventory now, but there's nothing exciting about modern Lego, except . . . walk a mile anywhere in the UK and you'll find some in the environment!

I cobbled this together from scraps after the above was pretty much done, from the left we have the modern iteration of the poplar, it's Lego DNA all but gone; a generic which may or may not be the same as the Wing Wha screen-capcha next to it; a Hong Kong copy of the chestnut, a Wing Luen hedge which seems to be half Lego and half Gem? Finally a comparison shot with the relatively common Jean-Big-Manurba-Dom-Heinerle-Leyla-whoever, marked W.Germany on its base.