What a digital certificate is, and what it is not

Every tree we send has a record attached to it: an identity, a species, the date its story began, the name you chose, and room for photographs and milestones as the years pass. You can personalise it, print it and come back to it. It is genuinely lovely, and we are proud of it.

It is also worth being exact about what it does, because words like “legacy” and “certificate” do a lot of quiet work in people’s heads, and the honest version is more useful than the flattering one.

What it is

A keepsake and a private record, in two halves.

The shareable half is the certificate: the tree’s identity, its species, the date the story began, the name you gave it, a dedication if you wrote one, and a general location — a town or a garden, not an address. This is the part you print, frame or send to someone.

The private half is the tree’s own record, visible to you and not published: exactly where the tree is, how to reach it, how it is growing, its photo timeline and height notes, and any wishes you have written down. The split is deliberate. A keepsake you hand round should not carry your home address, and the practical notes someone will one day need should not be a public document.

You can export the whole thing. It is your record, and you should be able to take it away.

What it is not

Not a will. A certificate does not direct what happens to your estate, your money, your possessions or your remains. In England and Wales that takes a properly made and witnessed will; Scotland has its own rules. If the tree matters as part of what you leave behind, mention it in your actual will and tell whoever will deal with your affairs that the record exists. Start with the government’s guidance on making a will, and take proper advice if your circumstances are not simple.

Not a land title. The certificate says a tree exists and that it is yours. It does not give you, or anyone after you, a legal interest in the ground it stands on. Land ownership in England and Wales is recorded by HM Land Registry, and nothing we issue touches that register. If the tree is planted on land you do not own, your right for it to stay there rests on your agreement with the landowner, not on us.

Not a burial right or a reserved plot. We do not sell, reserve or record any right of interment. Burial rights are granted by burial authorities and by the owners of consecrated and private ground, under their own rules and their own paperwork.

Not a funeral plan. Pre-paid funeral plans are a regulated financial product with strict rules about how customers’ money is held. We do not sell one, we are not part of one, and no money you pay us is set aside towards a funeral. If you want a funeral pre-paid, buy it from a firm authorised to sell one.

Not a carbon certificate. There is no tonnage on it, and there never will be until we can stand behind a number. We have written separately about why we do not print a carbon figure. Nothing on your certificate can be retired, traded, offset against anything or entered into a company’s reporting.

Not a death notification service. This one matters most, so we will be blunt. The system does not know when someone has died. It does not watch for inactivity, it does not draw conclusions from a silent account, and it will never send a message to a person you have named because you stopped logging in. If you record a nominated contact, that is a note of your wishes for a human being at DeathTree to read and act on — after a report has been reviewed and permissions checked, by a person, never automatically. Anything else would be a machine guessing about a death, and we are not building that.

Ashes, and asking first

People often buy a tree with ashes in mind, either their own or someone else’s, so it deserves a straight answer.

The first requirement is permission. Scattering or burying ashes on land needs the consent of whoever owns that land — your own garden is one thing, a park, a field, a verge or a churchyard quite another, and “nobody will mind” is not consent. If the tree will move to a permanent site, that is a conversation to have with the landowner long before the day.

The second requirement is the tree’s own interests, and it is the part that gets overlooked. Cremated remains are not compost. They are alkaline, high in salts and heavy in a few specific minerals, and a concentrated deposit at the base of a young tree can do it real harm. Placing ashes well means spreading them, diluting them, and choosing the distance and the moment — ideally with guidance from a crematorium, a burial authority or an arboriculturist rather than from an article. Ask us and we will tell you what we know and where its limits are.

Why we spell this out

Because a certificate that quietly implies more than it delivers is worse than no certificate at all. Nobody should discover, at the worst possible moment, that the beautiful printed thing in the drawer was not the document they assumed it was.

What the record is genuinely good at is memory. Which spring the blossom came early. How tall it was when your daughter was born. Where it is, how to get to it, and what you hoped would happen next. That is not a small thing to leave behind. It is just not a legal instrument, and we would rather say so.

If you want the practical side to be watertight, do three things: make a proper will, tell one living person that this record exists, and keep an exported copy somewhere they can find.