Light up Winter Willow

This is a truly big  and beautiful willow growing a little way back from the Derwent River bank that I walk past often. In summer it’s a  big green marquee of foliage, but in winter you can see its infrastructure. Its branches reach out to fill the space available, or more likely, it has fought for its place, shading out, sucking moisture and drowning other species saplings in leaf-drift. Looked at like this, a semi-sentient being, it becomes more alien and less knowable than when it’s viewed as a piece of landscape architecture. 
I don’t think it’s going to up its roots like an Ent, or become a whomping willow, but there’s always a feeling of tension when passing it, as if the electrically charged fields of the earth are disrupted or changed by its bulk and vitality. And in fact, of course they are. In summer this willow’s leaves produce a charge just by the wind rubbing its leaves together and throughout the rest of the year – to a greater or lesser extent – it does it by maintaining a pH imbalance between its insides and the surrounding soil. (It does this by pumping water nutrients and charged particles through its xylem and phloem.) Some estimates say that one tree could power 7 homes. – although what that would do for the well-being of a tree has not been tested.
With the continual energy price rises I think that rather than trying to transport electricity from trees to home, we should be developing a tree that we could live inside and then we’d have all the free electricity we’d need. 
Bags me for this willow!