COUNTRY LIFE
ENGLISH weather at its worst is never boring ; and often it is exciting. Witness one of the latest thunderstorms. It took many eccentric courses, some of which I had never seen before. One large elm, for example, was struck by some form of what is called diffused lightning. The outer twigs were robbed of their leaves ; the trunk, on two sides, showed, not scorched streaks as usual, but two broad irregular panels of nakedness. Stranger still, the roots were the worst sufferers. Four trenches were dug about a foot broad and seven yards long from the trunk outwards. At the floor of one the radiating elm-roots, shallow as usual, were clearly exposed, but undamaged In another they were cut into logs. My experience, cdnfirmed by statistics, has been that oaks are the usual victims. The oaks about this elm were untouched, but on the other hand an oak gate-post about a hundred yards away was split open from top to bottom. It looked to me as if the lightning had been conducted thither by the iron railing. The country house about two hundred yards away lost many of its upstairs, but not downstairs, window-panes. In other examples of dispersed lightning that I have seen the sufferers were a sequoia and a lime, both of which had a number of the outer branches shrivelled. Close by the sequoia a very old ash-tree was lit and burned for days.
Previous page
