username, I like your attempt to explain the sundial story but it doesn’t work.
First, if the trees could be seen then any fool would know that they were causing the problem. They wouldn’t have needed the Baal Hatanya for that. And if they couldn’t be seen they couldn’t disturb the sundial in any way.
Second, and this is what I meant when I wrote about the hours 2 to 5 pm being impossible, if the trees were disturbing to any extent then they could not have disturbed from 2 shaos zemaniyos after chatzos until 5 shaos zemaniyos after chatzos. There is a site called timeanddate where you can find the height of the sun (in degrees) at any time of any day of any year. For the sake of argument I entered Krakow, a city in southern Poland, as the difference between winter and summer there is not as extreme as it would be further north or in Russia. The sun’s height at 2 shaos zemaniyos after chatzos varies between 52 and 14 degrees. At 5 shaos zemaniyos it varies between 9 and 6 degrees. You physically can’t construct something that would disturb the sundial during davka those hours. Furthermore, as the height of the trees would not vary greatly during the seasons – and there is a HUGE difference in height between 52 and 14 degrees – it wouldn’t have affected the same hours throughout the year.
Your final paragraph suggesting why the Rayatz wrote the story in that way may indeed be correct, but why is it any worse than what I wrote that he was writing fiction? Personally, if I would have been you I would have preferred saying that my rebbe intentionally wrote interesting fiction to captivate and influence his readers than to say that he somehow made a mistake.