After many weeks of experimentation, I finally developed a method that is relatively easy that gets results I am happy with. Except for the very top of the ridge, the shape is formed from a single nurbs patch. The thatch strands are mapped onto a flat patch before being shaped much like a texture can be mapped onto a nurbs surface but actual 3d geometry is mapped not a 2d texture. This was done using the Seamless3d radical patch feature with a little modification made to make the strands orientate relative to the surface of the patch. One problem with this method is, because so many triangles are needed for all those strands, I had to wait a lot for seamless to process many of the operations but this could be speeded up significantly by improvements made to how seamless handles data in the future. See the gallery for more images and in higher resolution:
http://www.seamless3d.com/gallery/page6.html