distributing rigged/animated meshes with hair particles

Hi-

I’m pretty new with particles and everything, so I’m going to guess that there’s got to be some easy way to do this, but I just can’t seem to find it.

I have a forest scene that I’ve made by distributing trees, bushes, grass, etc. across a landscape with a hair particle system. It worked great and I got a good render out of it. But now I’ve re-built each kind of object so that it has an armature and a “swaying in the wind” animation (with the sapling generator). and I want to sub in the animated ones for the static meshes. Previously, I had grouped the source meshes and then under the render tab in my particles panel I just hit “group” and selected the group and voila. But if I group the animated meshes and do the same, the armatures don’t get distributed with them and they don’t animate. If I include the armatures in the group it distributes them as separate objects, and again i get no animation (plus a lot of loose armatures all over the scene). And obviously if I group just the armatures then that’s all that gets distributed. How can I get it to distribute copies of the source objects with ​their armatures attached? Thanks!