The Lightning Tree

On my walks around the old golf course, on my patch, I always pay my respects to my favourite tree – probably in the world. I doff a mental cap to the Lightning Tree. I honour its plucky underdog-edness, its tenacity, its will to live.

With innards hollowed out so that only a shell of oak remains, it was almost certainly struck by lightning. When lightning hits a tree it can have a variety of effects, some get off lightly – but not this one. The strike may well have raised the core temperature so much that the sap boiled, some trees explode, this one is burnt out.

I can stand inside and survey the damage. What are now the walls of this trunk cubicle are charred to black, with a texture like the skin of a dark snake, greened in places by algae. I can look up and see the sky through a portal of burnt wood. I’m standing in the place heartwood should be – the place that fire has voided.

This winter’s morning it looks to be in a sorry state. The lightning tree appears to be on its last legs. Boughs lie strewn nearby like fallen dead on a battlefield. Other branches are walking wounded – still attached to the tree – but jacknifed into injured chevrons. The tree looks beaten, bent and cowed into a moribund husk.

But there is an amazing transformation in summer so that from afar it could almost pass for a regulation oak. Despite the fire wrought insults it springs back into leafy life – determined to carry – the oak undead.

...But there is an amazing transformation in summer

The fact that it grows, seemingly as normal, is testament to the fact that most of the trunk’s living material is in the inner bark. The processes vital to the tree growth – the uptake of water and minerals from the roots, via the xylem, and transportation of food (sugars etc) through the phloem carry on unhindered.

The song The Lighting Tree by the Settlers could almost have been written about this particular tree.

"Down in the meadow where the wind blows free, in the middle of a field stands a lightning tree.
It's limbs all torn from the day it was born for the tree was born in a thunderstorm.
Grow, grow, the lightning tree, it's never too late for you and me;
Grow, grow, the lightning tree, never give in too easily."

And on this freezing cold December morning I can see, indeed, that it isn’t giving in too easily.
Twigs are replete, tipped with buds. Next year's embryonic leaves are there, all present and correct. There's the promise of spring. Despite the odds, this is a tree not yet ready to give up its oaky ghost to the great wildwood in the sky.

Lightning Tree I salute you!