They will not remember you planting it.
The honest position with a new grandchild is that you do not know how much of their life you will see. Some of it, probably. Not the interesting part, possibly.
People plant trees for new babies all the time, and most of those trees are planted by the parents and forgotten by everyone inside four years. This works better in the other direction. You grow it, and at some point it becomes theirs.
Three reasons to do it in reverse.
You keep it first
The tree lives with you while they are small. You water it, you move it into a bigger pot, you photograph it each summer. It accumulates a record that belongs to your house rather than theirs.
The handover is the gift
At eighteen, or whenever they have a garden, the tree goes to them with everything attached: the year it started, how tall it was each summer, and the notes you wrote. That is a better inheritance than a savings account nobody remembers opening.
It covers the years you will not see
An oak planted the year a grandchild is born is barely middle-aged by the time they retire. You will not be there for that. The tree will, and so will the record of who started it.
Making the handover work
- Photograph it on roughly the same date each year. The sequence is what makes the record worth anything later.
- Write the notes as you go rather than at the end. What you thought in year three is not recoverable in year eighteen.
- Agree with their parents early whether the tree is eventually theirs to plant or yours to plant for them. That conversation is easier now than it will be in a decade.
- Export the record to a file at least once. It should not depend on this company still existing in 2044.
English Oak
The one most likely to still be standing when they are old. It also needs a permanent site agreed before it goes in the ground, which is worth raising with their parents early.
From £149.
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.
You are not buying them a memorial. You are buying yourself eighteen years of something to do with them, and them a tree at the end of it.
