Building Plants in SL

Can anyone give me some advice on building plants, shrubs, trees etc and the best way to miminise the alpha effect. I have noticed that some plant life in sl while it is sttill present it is not as bad as in the ones i have made so far.

Do you mean fully prim'd plants, or the 'cutout' 2/3/4 prim plants?

For full prim, your best friend is the torus, along with cylinders, cut and tapered. They allow you to get the most natural shapes, and that's what you want. Most non-sculpty prim plants have a lot more prims than you normally want for something of it's size, but generally if you work hard enough at it you can make some comparatively low-prim plants.

Mainly it's just working with geometric shapes to recreate the un-uniformity of nature. Try different combinations, and see what looks best.

For the alpha glitch problem, you should only have to worry about it on foliage (Or the cutout plants, which actually use this problem to their advantage most of the time). Use a non-alpha bark texture for the wood of your tree, and then some odd trapezoids and such for foliage (Get's more than one plane per prim), textured with an alpha leaf/needle/whatever image. If using trapezoids, though, don't use that texture for all sides of each trap, keep some alpha clear, completely, so you don't just have leaf boxes.