To tree or not to tree

I've been thinking a lot about trees lately.

Don't you wish your life was this exciting?

After looking at my AAR photos from my Nov. 1 zombie game, I'm reminded of my dissatisfaction with my lack of appropriate foliage for non-tropical locales. As DIY as they are and happy with my trees as I am when gaming a battle on the surface of Venus in 1889 or on a recently discovered island off of Africa's coast in 1885, they have the wrong look for the forests of France in 1944.

Now, believe me, I'm not looking for "realism" in my miniature battles - I use pieces of felt to dictate the area covered by woods and use step-type hills. I use paper flats when I play fantasy games (rpg or Chronicles of Blood). And how many identical figures do I have in a given unit? Unless they're either clones or brothers, it's far from realistic. 

And, yet, all of this works for me (at least at some level. I really have trouble with not seeing a figure=1 man). But the wrong type of trees? Unacceptable.

Let's chalk this up to a character quirk.

In any case, and before I start to sound more than a little nutty,  I've decided I want to do pine/evergreen and I'm considering the following options:

• Cake decorating trees
• Some variation of paper flat trees

The front runner? Paper trees. Yes, paper trees. Oh how I do love irony! 

That and there's something about paper flats and models that appeals to me. Yet another character quirk.

While there are a couple of commercial products over at Wargamevault, I really like the style (and price:free!) of Oversoul's Forest (the link is about 2/3s down the page).My primary concern is the ink consumption for my deskjet. Since I have no intention of covering the table in a one-to-one  replica of the Ardennes forest, this may not be as big an issue as it seemed to me at first brush.

I've also got some ideas to work around this issue using green card stock, but I'm not sure when I'll be able to do a feasibility test. Never mind where to get a decent weight green card stock. 

In the meantime, assuming I have a chance to game any time soon, I think I may dig out those weird looking semi-flat plastic trees that came with the cheap bag of dinosaurs I got for Christmas a few years ago.