Built a field of wheat -- need suggestions on how to improve

I built a field of wheat, but I'm not particularly happy with the results and I'm hoping someone can help me improve it. The problems, which are described in more detail below, have to do with flexible path issues and general issues with using prims to make plants. You can see step by step instructions how I made the field of wheat along with snapshots on my blog www.secondlifehowto.com.

Basically what I did is the following:
1. Each row of wheat is made up of two oblong cyclindrical prims that I call WheatTop and WheatBody. WheatTop has transparency showing the heads of grain sticking up. WheatBody is a bunch of stalks with no transparency. I felt I needed the two prims so that you could look down from the top through the transparent WheatTop prim and see the WheatBody prim instead of seeing right to the ground.

2. I made both Prims Flexible path.

Here’s the issues I ran into:

1. If you make both the top and bottom prim flexible path, then they fall away from each other. I sort of fixed this problem by rotating bottom prim so that it was flipped upside down. That way the upward pointing side of the prim was fixed and the bottom side swayed. However, maybe someone out there knows a better way to do this.

2. When the wind blows hard enough, the base prim twists so far to the side you get this ugly effect where you see the top and bottom faces of the cylinder. I’m trying to make amber waves of grain, not amber flapping twisted cylinders!! I tried to fix this by making the base prim longer so that it stretched underground with the idea that if it is long enough it won’t be able to be blown up so you can see the bottom of the cylinder. This technique hasn’t worked yet, but maybe it would if I went further. (You can see a picture of this on my blog www.secondlifehowto.com)

3. From the top the rows of wheat look like rows of squashed cylindrical prims. I don’t know if anybody has any suggestions to improve this effect?

I'm also open to an entirely different path to creating a field of grain if someone thinks the path I'm on is not the best.

Alright, I figure it out. Here's what I did:
1. I used three concentric hollowed out boxes and put texture on the inside and the outside of the box.
2. I placed an flattend cube as the floor of the concentric boxes and put a texture on the top of it.

You can see the results on my blog at www.secondlifehowto.com