The mighty White Pine is a kingpin of Ontario history. So I was chuffed to discover several scrawny ones amongst the Thicket. Being crowded by poplar and birch and some unidentifiable scraggly trees, most of them have branches on one side and several have branches only at their crowns. They would make poor Christmas trees, even if you did have a 30 foot ceiling in your living room.
I approached the pines with the same foundation as other trees in the thicket – twisted wire. For the larger branches, I doubled up the wire to make a horizontal Y shape to support the lesser branches. Maintaining a straight trunk is a slight challenge, and as I was completing the last of the pines, I realized I should have made a jute bottle brush at the very top of the tree.
On the first pine, I experimented with branch structures made by unwinding jute twine and holding them flat while dousing them with paint. These look quite good, but you can’t count on the paint to hold them together; glue is needed and they need to be clamped or pressed between layers of wax paper. This makes each branch even too laborious for me, and so I sought an alternative.
Next, I tried very thin poly fibre, but found that was too fluffy. I landed instead on pieces of a fibrous natural furnace filter, which has been aging gracefully in a tote in the attic for over a decade. Gordon Gravett suggests scrubbing pads, which are much denser than the furnace filter.
I glued the furnace filter to the Y-shaped limbs with Aileen’s tacky glue. The smaller limbs near the top of the tree receive the jute twine option because the limbs start to reach up, exposing the branch structure, which doesn’t look much like furnace filter.
The needles are 1-3 mm Woodland Scenics “Dark Green” static grass. These are too long for real white pine but do give an appropriately fuzzy appearance to the branches. To apply the static grass, I hit the tree with Dollarama extra hold hair spray. I have no idea what this stuff is, but it sure sticks things together. I can’t imagine putting it in my hair. Any grass that gets on the trunk can be removed with a stiff wet brush until the hairspray sets.
Inspired by Malcolm Vant’s presentation on weeds at the last Railway Modellers’ Meet, I tried feeding one of the photos to my phone to see if I had fooled it. The result might be the proudest moment of my modelling career.
Pembroke:87 
It looks good! I’m just waiting for you to put one of these on a rock, wind swept and craggy, al a Tom Thompson.
Funny you should say… there are three big pines on a shallow crag just north of the Alfred Street crossing. However, I think, like Tom Thomson’s they are Jack Pines.
There’s a subtle niche opportunity some day. If I recall correctly, give or take, around your model time zone Tom had just returned to Ontario . . . still years from making his mark. But the trees would be preparing themselves for that day.