Scenery

Landscaping a layout with live cactus plants

By Bruce Petty
A green thumb goes a long way for realistic desert scenes on a model railroad.
Set in Southern California, my HO layout includes a Southern Pacific train order office surrounded by a desert scene. Although this arid landscape has sparse vegetation, my scene needed two prominent desert plants - palm trees and cacti - to look complete. I found good artificial palm trees, but commercially available artificial cacti didn't look very realistic. Scratchbuilding the plants would involve more time than I wanted to spend, so I abandoned the project and waited for a manufacturer to make an acceptable cactus.

Inspiration struck in spring of 2002 when I noticed that the sprouts of our cactus houseplants looked to be HO scale. With help from Cheryl, my wife and an expert gardener, I came up with a technique for planting and maintaining live cacti on my layout.

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