Talkin’ trees

is his joy

Being a business administrator is not his strong suit, but Jamieson realizes it is a large part of his job. “But I don’t get a lot of my energy from the administrative side of the business,” he says.

His strength comes from the satisfaction of his customers.

“When I’m having a bad day, I like to call one of our clients and just talk to them about their trees. That always seems to help.”

Jamieson never envisioned himself climbing the corporate ladder to become head of a business with annual revenues exceeding $50 million. But climbing the ladder up to a ranger station in a forest canopy somewhere in a national park? Well, that’s a different story.

“When I was in school at Purdue in the early ’80s, I think everybody in the forestry department, me included, wanted to be a forest ranger,” Jamieson says. “Being by yourself, out in the woods, and getting paid for it, too, well, that seemed like a pretty good way to make a living.”

But Jamieson and his classmates found one problem. There weren’t enough ranger jobs for all the demand. So Jamieson turned his attention to the cities.

An urban

opportunity

If a place so pure as the Indiana Dunes of his childhood could provide an environmental balance to something so foul as the foundries of Gary, why couldn’t trees, plants and grassways be used to soften the concrete and steel of urban environments?

Because of their constant exposure to pollutants, typically poor soil conditions, vandalism and other factors, trees have a short life expectancy in the city — only seven years.

Caring for them would be a difficult, but rewarding, job.

As odd as it sounds, Jamieson found that an urban forester could have a much greater impact on his or her surroundings than someone in a ranger station in the middle of nowhere.

“In a large city, three or four trees in a courtyard may be seen by a million people a year,” Jamieson explains. “Those three trees take on an increased value over three trees in a rural setting.”