Week 3 of The Nature Academy - Trees

I have always wanted to create a mountainside covered in heather in Blender.  So I used this weeks tutorial to create heather in Arbaro, import it into Blender and add materials and textures.  I didn't think I would get away with a small shrub as my tree project, so I also created a scots pine in Arbaro.  One problem, Arbaro won't let you control the distribution of stems on a branch.  I ended up creating two models for the tree.  One for the main trunk and branches and another for the smaller branches and needles, and fitting it all together in blender.

For the image, as well as the heather (foreground), I also had a field day with particle systems for low poly heather (an instanced model with about 40 verts), scree and grass.  I used weight painting to control what went where.

Here is the result:

The Last Tree in the Forest

Comments very welcome.

Update:  I am really struggling with the components of the image here.   I put the tree on a separate render layer to avoid it being influenced by the sky bleed on the mountains.  Now I am having to do extra tutorials to figure out how to re-incorporate it back into the scene.  And I still have glow-in-the-dark grass!