01-17-2009, 02:11 PM
About 20 years ago I helped my youngest daughter make a diorama. Each of the kids in the class was assigned to make a diorama representing a specific state. My daughter decided that she wanted to do Florida. I cut a couple of plywood boards 12" x 12" and cut a hole in the center of one and glued the 2 boards together to make a lake in the center. I was working nights so I wasn't able to make it to the open house where my daughter's diorama was displayed with an A grade. My wife told me she overheard parents saying "there is a diorama made by one of the parents!" Actually all I did was cut a hole in a board and glue 2 boards together. I showed her techniques to make scenery and she did it. One thing we made was palmettos. I think palmettos are probably the most common vegetation in Florida and as far as I know nobody makes models of palmettos.
A palmetto is a short, stubby palm tree (palm bush?) that is 2-3 feet tall when full grown. The trunk is rough, brown, and kind of barrel shaped. What we did to make palmettos was to buy some of the smallest M E palm plastic trees. They may have been n-scale, I don't remember now. We cut the trunks down to about 1/2 inch in length. We then dipped the trunk into Elmer's white glue and dipped the wet trunk into sawdust. When the sawdust/glue mix dried, we repeated the process until the trunk had the fullness that we were looking for. She then planted the palmettos into the diorama.
I just "googled" palmetto and what came up was a much bigger tree. A related search yielded a dwarf palmetto which may be what we were modeling. I remember seeing them all over Florida when visiting relatives down there. I could not find a decent pic of them, but perhaps one of the members from Florida could post a pic of them. The last time we were down there was after the big fire that burned off much of the open spaces between Daytona Beach and Gainsville, and it may have been that we were seeing small palmettos that had not yet reached full height, but I remember seeing vast fields that seemed to be full of the little palm trees.
A palmetto is a short, stubby palm tree (palm bush?) that is 2-3 feet tall when full grown. The trunk is rough, brown, and kind of barrel shaped. What we did to make palmettos was to buy some of the smallest M E palm plastic trees. They may have been n-scale, I don't remember now. We cut the trunks down to about 1/2 inch in length. We then dipped the trunk into Elmer's white glue and dipped the wet trunk into sawdust. When the sawdust/glue mix dried, we repeated the process until the trunk had the fullness that we were looking for. She then planted the palmettos into the diorama.
I just "googled" palmetto and what came up was a much bigger tree. A related search yielded a dwarf palmetto which may be what we were modeling. I remember seeing them all over Florida when visiting relatives down there. I could not find a decent pic of them, but perhaps one of the members from Florida could post a pic of them. The last time we were down there was after the big fire that burned off much of the open spaces between Daytona Beach and Gainsville, and it may have been that we were seeing small palmettos that had not yet reached full height, but I remember seeing vast fields that seemed to be full of the little palm trees.