"What's a "Thicket" look like?" Topic

And how does it compare to the look of a dense woods? Google gives inconsistent results.

And any ideas for how to represent a thicket on the table top?

Thanks.

As I understand it, thickets are very dense vegetation, usually without major trees.

I'd represnt it with thick, dense brush 10-15' tall.

It should provide good cover but no concealment. Movement through it should be slow (1/2 speed).

A thicket is the undergrowth in a wooded area. Even back in Napoleonic times the forests were denoted by the undergrowth. This influenced traficability.
Oak trees and Pinetrees with a high canopy often had little undergrowth.
Areas with smaller less dense trees are which had branches 'to the ground' tend to have denser undergrowth. the sun could reach to the cround and encourage random growth.

The planting of certain bushes would also encourage a thicket to grow.
Characteristics of them include entangled vines, prickly thorns and other factors which would make crossing them harder.

I suppose how best to represent it would depend on the scale. At ~28mm for example, I'd probably do one, maybe two trees, but fill most of the base with some kind of brambles or brush in order to make it visually distinct from a more heavily-wooded area.

here is a good example of a thicket dam near impassable.

I need to do it in 15mm. I guess I'll use lichen with a few trees sprinkled in as compared to woods which will be all trees.

Thanks for the information.

Yea, I always envision them as tangled brambles, with sharp, painful thorns, and being almost impenetrable to all but the smallest creatures, who seek them out for protection from larger creatures.

Worse than barbed wire to traverse through, at least on foot.

ie most of the woods in Pennsylvania.

Lots of large thorn bushes some as high as 6" tall that can cover a large area. If there are trees, they are things like sumac (at least in PA) and other short (4-10' tall) trees with thin trunks and branches, but since they are so low, the branches interlock and they can be really hard to move through. Some areas can have lots of ferns, or be more open but with tall grass and weeds.

Having spent almost all of my childhood in these kinds of woods, trust me…they are a pain to get through and navigate. You cannot go in a straight line and you will walk hundreds of steps in a zigzag pattern looking for a way through while only moving forward a few yards.

If you had a machete, yeah you could hack through it, but that is really slow going, cumbersome, noisy, and hard work.

I've helped clear woods to make paintball fields and it is not fun. Before we did work in some of these areas it was literally impossible to even play paintball. No one could move.

Here is a good pic outside looking at a thicket along the edge of a wood (this is at Gettysburg). You can see how in some places, this is like a virtual wall of vegetation. It isn't much better inside the woods. Lots of woods in PA have these around the outside and interspersed throughout.

I see a thicket whenever I look in a mirror.

Wish Birnam Wood would stop following me around.

Come over to my place. I will give you an up-close view of them. And a machette to help me clear them out.

I know alot of the thickets that I spent my childhood playing in were originally cleared farmland that was let go.

I've made thicket for my table in 28mm. It is easy to make, but kind of odd looking because it looks like a forest done in the wrong scale. like 28mm minis striding among a 6mm forest.

I made some random shaped small bases using washers and sculpy clay covered in sand. I used smaller scale trees and put a couple on each base. Then I put some foliage on the tree and then put large bushes around the trees, surrounding each so that there was little room between tree and bush. If you scatter these along the edges of your woods or clump.them together they can make areas of thicket.

Think of it as making clumps of forest in a much smaller scale for your minis.

I just realized you are in PA, so I apologize for telling you something you.might already know :)

Consider trying this air filter material: link

You should be able to get it at a hardware store. Sprayed brown, it makes rather nice looking brush. You could flock it too.

---

I did some field work in SW Oregon. Even with a machete, the manzanita and poison oak were basically impenetrable, or at least not worth the effort to hack through.