Dispersed Lightning Lightning may play curious tricks with a tree.
I know one lime tree in the garden of a charming house in Herefordshire, which is now a curious as well as a rather sorry spectacle. The tips of most boughs suddenly died or half died after a thunderstorm, though the tree itself is, and was, in full vigour. The putting forth of a vigorous brushwood of twigs on the lower parts of the boughs sufficiently proves the free flow of the sap—and the tree is comparatively young, say, thirty years of age. The theory seems to be that the lightning played about the leaves and inflicted pinpricks in lieu of a single stroke. Whether this actually happened or whether such a phenomenon is known elsewhere or on other trees than the ruby-tinted lime I do not know. It is certain, at any rate,- that the malady immediately followed an electric storm.
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