Reporting this story involved obtaining my first research permit, which allowed me to install a fascinating instrument to the truck of a gigantic London plane tree in Prospect park called a dendrometer. It allowed me to see, minute to minute, the changes in the tree’s growth over the course of a day, week and month over the spring and try to understand the environmental factors that influenced it. I chose one day in particular to write about, which just so happened to coincide with a stunning thunderstorm in the evening.

One morning earlier this summer, the sun rose over Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake. It was 5:28 a.m., and a black-crowned night heron hunched into its pale-gray wings. Three minutes later, the trunk of a nearby London plane tree expanded, growing in circumference by five-eighths of a millimetre. Not long afterward, a fish splashed in the lake, and the tree shrunk by a quarter of a millimetre. Two bullfrogs erupted in baritone harmony; the tree expanded. The Earth turned imperceptibly, the sky took on a violet hue, and a soft rain fell. Then the rain stopped, and the sun emerged to touch the uppermost canopy of the tree. Its trunk contracted by a millimetre. Then it rested, neither expanding or contracting, content, it seemed, to be an amphitheatre for the birds. Read the rest here