Ah, that would be a good way of discovering the
potential energy
Here's a mental image for MonsieurM....picture a Tesla coil with the huge sparks flying off out of the top of the coil. Snapshot the image in your mind and place over the top a tree trunk and leaves onto the HV spikes
If you have the space Seth, chaining up a few of those barber poles should net enough current to fire up one of your Tesla coils (on a Slayer type circuit). You'd then get your CFL lit.
I've had a mini tower runinng from solar before now and if you use say a C1213 or similar high hFE low saturation transistor you'll fire her up on a volt. Just a case then of increasing battery count, up to the point that the CFL begins to light. Twirly energy saver bulbs sometimes work best when held upside down about an inch from the top of a mini coil...such that you can see where you're going with the voltage needs for brighter, literally.
To incorporate trees
(fractal pattern ), I have wondered for some time about what may be termed pinging, first tree transmits, other tree bounces back the energy, yet increased due to the child on a swing analogy
(exponential function ). The switching time
(cycle)of the transistor being the time interval that creates the push effect of the swing, rather than an immediate bounce back again. In such a case, the first tree is the sender Tesla tower (roots being Ground and trunk being tower), the receiver tree is resonant with it. Trimming the tree trims the frequency to match the first tree.