The birthday where you start counting differently.
There is usually one birthday that lands differently. Not the party, but the week afterwards, when you find yourself working out how many summers that probably leaves and deciding the number is smaller than you assumed.
Most gifts at that age are apologetic. Another jumper, another bottle, another thing to find space for. People buy them because the alternative is admitting they do not know what you would like, and you accept them for the same reason.
Three reasons it suits a birthday.
Something to do, not something to own
A tree in a pot needs watering through its first summer and repotting after a couple of years. That is the point. It puts a small recurring thing in your year that produces visible progress, which is rarer after sixty than anyone admits.
The arithmetic works in your favour
A tree planted at sixty has a twenty-year head start on one planted after your funeral. By eighty it is a tree rather than a stick, and you were there for all of it. That head start is the whole argument for doing this now.
Easier to ask for than to receive
If people keep asking what you want, this is a straightforward answer. It costs roughly what a good dinner costs, and unlike the jumper it has a chance of still being here in thirty years.
If you are going to ask for one
- Name the species. Four is a short enough list to choose from, and it saves whoever is buying from guessing at something they cannot return easily.
- Say where it will live. A pot on a patio and a permanent spot in a lawn are not the same decision, and they are not always the same tree.
- Check the delivery area before anybody orders. We send to the UK mainland and not to the islands, and the postcode is checked at the till rather than after.
Silver Birch
It grows fast enough to reward you within a few years, which matters when the appeal is watching it rather than imagining it.
From £139.
A starting point, nothing more — all four are here with their mature sizes side by side, and what a legacy tree is and is not covers the ground this page assumes.
None of this needs deciding today. All four trees are on one page with their mature sizes and prices, and the birthday will still be there next week.
