WILLIAMSBURG — Virginians have a new opportunity to plant living souvenirs of Jamestown’s 400th anniversary in their backyards.

Thanks to the state Department of Forestry, two-year-old cherrybark oak seedlings grown from the acorns of huge trees on Jamestown Island are being offered for sale starting this month.

“They’re beautiful plants,“ said Billy Apperson, the forester who researched the trees’ connection with the 17th-century Jamestown settlement. He also supervised harvesting the acorns and germinating them as a commemorative project.

Now the department has begun taking orders for 18- to 40-inch seedlings that can live for 250 years and reach heights of more than 100 feet. The crop of seedlings, all from Jamestown Island acorns and grown at the department’s hardwood nursery in Augusta County, exceeds 100,000 plants.

“It’s the highest quality red oak that grows in North America,“ Apperson said. “It produces the highest quality lumber.“

Apperson is a state forester with responsibility for James City and York counties. He also specializes in germinating new trees to continue the lives of famous and beloved trees that are threatened by disease, damage or old age.

One of his projects was the McGuffey Ash at the University of Virginia. He took cuttings from the famous but ailing tree, grafted them to young ash root stock, and produced a 10-foot sapling that was planted in the McGuffey Ash’s place in 1996.

Department officials asked him several years ago to identify a tree that would have significance to the anniversary of Jamestown’s establishment in 1607 as the first permanent English settlement in America.

Apperson knew the cherrybark, whose botanical name is quercus pagoda, is a dominant hardwood on Jamestown Island. With help from researchers at Colonial Williamsburg, he learned that early Jamestown’s first export to England was oak lumber. The shipments included boards that were 40 feet long and 4 feet wide.

He concluded those spectacular boards must have come from the cherrybark oaks, which are native to the island and generally grow near marshes and riverbanks. Jamestown Island has been completely logged several times since 1607, and the oldest cherrybarks on the island now are about 150 years old.

Apperson said the same type of tree has come back each time as the “climax,“ or final species that emerges in the natural progression of forest growth on the island.

“Nature will bring back what’s supposed to be growing there before mankind destroyed it,“ Apperson said. “They weren’t planted. Nature just put them back where they belong.“

Andrew Petkofsky is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.