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I picked up two things earlier today:

-A Baneblade
-A Branchwych

The connection between the two is that I wish to run Imperial Guard Tree People. An entire army of battle-cannon equipped Groots!

How would one make this fit within the fluff of 40k?

..... abhumans?

BrianDavion wrote:
..... abhumans?

I'd like a touch more detail than that.

I was thinking possibly warp-tainted trickery that has yet to be discovered, but I'm not totally sure.

Edit: Did some writing.

Arborous, The Green Planet
Arborous is an out-of-the-way planet, with a bright sun and a peaceful atmosphere. War occasionally touches the planet-it's not TOO far from the Eye of Terror, meaning Chaos Raids are not unheard of, and Feral Orks have been on the planet since forever, but overall, the people get to live in safety and tranquility, for the most part. Arborous is almost entirely covered in forests, with trees that stretch miles tall.

The people of Arborous, initially when colonized by the Imperium, built cities in the canopies, and a few floating high above the trees. But, as technology failed and resources became scarcer, they steadily moved deeper. And the beasts of the deep forest... They didn't like that. The people learned to camouflage themselves with leaves and wood, from the forests. As time went on, and contact with the Imperium became less and less, they became ritualistic, anointing themselves with the unguents of the forest. And, over time and generations, that resulted in... Changes.

Nowadays, the people of Arborous are one with the trees. Their skin is bark; their flesh, wood; their blood, sap; and their minds are moss. They are still highly active, though, contributing valuable Arborous wood to the Imperium of Man (used by various Forgeworlds, including Mars itself, in the construction of their weapons. Mostly for style) as well as soldiers. The tree-people of Arborous are, while not tougher against gunfire than those of flesh and blood, far less liable to tire, nearly able to run for as long as a Space Marine (though not nearly as fast) and require only soil, water, and sunlight to survive. The Mechanicus, knowing that should the Inquisition find this strange variety of abhuman, would likely destroy them, has so far kept Arborous a closely guarded secret. They are careful to keep the prying eyes of the Emperor far from where the soldiers of Arborous serve.

I feel like they'd make more sense using Chaos rules than Guard, given the preponderance of melee loadouts/magic swords/walking monsters rather than any kind of guns or tanks. You've also got the size problem in that Dryads and the spirit-dudes are both really quite big by comparison to Guardsmen, and claiming models on 32mm bases are 4pt Guardsmen is definitely something that'll be a modeling-for-advantage problem.

I had a half-done concept model using a Kurnoth Hunter that was going to be a Tzeentchian Obliterator where I was going to sculpt greenstuff flames coming out of the armour at various points and then paint it silver, like it was some kind of weird Dark-Mechanicum project where they'd grown metal into pseudo-organic shapes and then called up a flaming daemon to posses it and given it a bow firing magic exploding arrows of some sort, but that project has been abandoned and I don't think I have the model anymore.

I'd suggest dropping the "Mechanicum is protecting the obvious deviants who would be subject to immediate exterminatus if anyone else became aware of them"; that's the kind of thing that to me busts the setting logic and throws the fit wildly out of whack. If you want to keep them as mutated humans rather than some kind of strange xenos the lore really reads to me like there's a daemon involved and this ought to be a Chaos army rather than a Guard army.

If you're dead-set on a Guard army that's going to use the tree-people I'd suggest tweaking it so that the tree-people are some kind of Dark Age robots these people have access to and building some normal-sized unmutated infantrymen out of Wood Elf models (with the Eternal Guard kit you could take the spear arms and make them some kind of Stargate-esque staff blaster, and use the hooded heads so there are no pointy ears to explain away, and be approximately done) rather than trying to sell someone on 32mm-based Dryads as Guardsmen or inhuman mutants as loyalist Imperials capable of allying freely with anyone you feel like tossing into the army.

What about a variant of the Catachan Brain Leaf?

Tree people (or Homo sapiens verdantus) are a canon recognised strain of abhumans in 40k.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Troth