Angelica Ramos
Contributing Writer
MONTGOMERY COUNTY- Jamie King, Virginia Tech’s Urban Forester, has had a hand in preserving a major natural landmark and preserves nature’s history all over campus.
King is the urban forest manager and university arborist for Virginia Tech and is in charge of planting, general maintenance and health of the trees on campus. These duties center on preservation and sustainability of ecosystems. He also worked as the city arborist for the City of Roanoke. King had a hand in preserving the Merry Oak, a historical landmark with connection to Historical Smithfield. The Merry Oak was where the enslaved people at Smithfield would celebrate weddings, hold religious ceremonies, hold meetings and was simply the hub for them to gather as a people. Before the Merry Oak was a hub for the enslaved people, it was maintained and cared for by the Monacans and other First Nations people before colonization of the local area.
“I’ve been working with trees and people,” King said, “for 16 years and that’s thousands and thousands of trees. It’s about 50,000 constituents here at the university and there were 98,000 constituents in the City of Roanoke, that’s a lot of trees and people. Until I met the Merry Tree, until I met the people who love it, I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to connect people with nature. The biggest thing that I can do, in my career, is help connect people to the world around them and when I met the Merry Tree, I’d finally met a tree where people were already connected. For hundreds of years, people have been going to that tree and telling its story.”
The Merry Oak, since it failed in a wind storm and died, has been crafted into a commemorative bench, a table, and a sculpture so far. Its stump still stands inside a fenced-in enclosure at Smithfield, where it still stretches high into the sky monolithically.
Trees predate human existence by millions of years, but humans have never existed without the presence of trees. King, who has worked with thousands of trees, 11,800 of which are on Virginia tech’s campus, says that trees are like “standing sentinels” to which their impact on humanity is still very much evident as they still improve the health and well-being for the species, like humans, that depend upon their existence. King explained that studies show that communing with nature has been proven to lower blood pressure and that people still instinctually, especially when stressed, go out into nature to alleviate those symptoms and better their health. The trees on Virginia Tech’s campus are inventoried into a database that is publicly accessible, with their species, location, native status, and other details. King, along with students and colleagues, obtain this data and use it to help care and sustain this public resource and natural history.
With genuine care and love for nature, especially trees, King says that working on preserving the Merry Oak has been the greatest honor of his career.
“To my knowledge,” King said, “that tree is the longest documented landmark here at Virginia Tech. We’re proud of our buildings. We’re proud of the landscape. We’re proud of our military history. We’re proud of all these different things that are pretty important, but that tree and its cohort of other white oaks that grow on the campus that are of similar age, were here before the land was colonized. They were actively managed by the Monacans and other First Nations. That legacy is so long and sure, I am at the end of that story, but isn’t it a pleasure to be part of it.”