It took a while, cause I was very busy the last couple of weeks.
Thanks a lot for all the nice comments, they are very appreciated.
Here some answers regarding trees, hedges...
the shadows are all produced by simple 3D tree models from VB exteriors,
most of the trees you see in the images are mapped textures.
rendertime between 48 to 96 hours with two quad-cores
lightning is done with physical sky or hdri + some maxwell database lights.
regards
Markus