Terms & conditions

1. Who you are contracting with

DeathTree is a trading name of Acorn Reserve Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales under company number 13242218. Registered office: Queen Street Chambers, 68 Queen Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, S1 1WR, England. Your contract for a tree is with Acorn Reserve Ltd.

Write to us at hello@deathtree.co.uk. We do not publish a telephone number; email is how to reach us, and a person reads every message.

Acorn Reserve Ltd is not registered for VAT. The price you see is the price you pay, with nothing added at checkout except the delivery charge shown below.

2. What we sell

A young British tree, sent to your home in either the Original or the Heritage package. What each package includes is set out on the page for the tree you choose.
A digital certificate and tree record, kept in your account, which you can personalise, print and export.
DeathTree Care, an optional yearly plan at £39 a year. See section 8.
Return to Care, where we look after your tree for an agreed period. This is quoted case by case after an assessment and is covered by a separate written agreement, not by these terms.

We sell to consumers buying for themselves or as a gift. The shop is not set up for business, trade or resale purchases.

3. A tree is a living thing

You are buying a living plant, not a manufactured product. It will change with the seasons, grow at its own pace and depend on where you put it and how it is cared for.

Mature heights, habits and lifespans on our tree pages describe what the species can become. They are not a promise about the young tree you receive, and the illustrations are drawings of mature specimens rather than photographs of your tree.

We do not offer a survival guarantee. What we do commit to is that your tree leaves us healthy, correctly identified and properly packed, and that it arrives in good condition — see section 9.

We make no carbon or offset claim. Your tree record shows its carbon status asNot measured, because no measurement has been made. A credible figure would need a recognised method, real measurements of your tree and stated assumptions, so we would rather record nothing than invent a number.

4. Your order, and when the contract starts

You choose a tree, a package and whether to add DeathTree Care, then pay at checkout. Your order is an offer to buy. The contract between us begins when we email you an order confirmation with your order number — not when you pay.

If we cannot fulfil your order we will tell you and refund you in full. That might happen because the tree you chose is no longer available in the size you paid for, because your delivery address is outside the area we can send a living tree to, or because a price or description on the site was obviously wrong.

We may also decline an order where we reasonably believe it is fraudulent, or where we cannot deliver to the address given.

5. Prices and payment

Prices are in pounds sterling and are shown on each tree page and again in your basket before you pay. A delivery charge of £9.95 is added per order.

Because we are not VAT registered, no VAT is added to any price on this site and no VAT is shown on your confirmation.

Payment is taken by card through Stripe, our payment provider. Your card details are entered on Stripe’s own secure checkout: we never see them and we never hold them. We keep only Stripe’s reference for the payment, so we can match it to your order and refund it if needed.

The price of your tree is fixed when you order. If we change our prices afterwards, it makes no difference to an order already placed.

6. Delivery

We deliver to UK mainland addresses only and dispatch within 10 working days. Some offshore postcode areas are excluded from our flat rate, and we will always offer to quote rather than simply refuse.

Risk in the tree passes to you when it is delivered to the address you gave us, or to someone you asked us to leave it with.

Read the full delivery terms.

7. Cancelling and returns

You have 14 days from the day you receive your tree to change your mind, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Email hello@deathtree.co.uk — any clear statement that you are cancelling is enough, and you do not have to give a reason.

A tree is a living thing. You keep your full 14-day right to cancel, but please tell us as soon as you can so the tree can be cared for.

Read the full cancellation and returns terms, including who pays return postage and when we refund.

8. DeathTree Care

DeathTree Care costs £39 a year and is taken as a yearly subscription through Stripe. It renews on the same date each year until you cancel.

It includes a yearly care pack suited to your tree’s stage, seasonal reminders and growing notes, guidance on when to consider repotting, and support in keeping your photo timeline. Pots, planting kits, replacement trees, transport and nursery fees are not included unless we specifically agree them with you.

You can cancel at any time from your account or by emailing us. Your plan then runs to the end of the year you have already paid for and does not renew. We do not refund part of a year that has begun unless we have failed to provide what was promised, in which case you are entitled to a remedy under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

When you first subscribe you also have 14 days to cancel under the 2013 Regulations. If you asked us to start straight away and we have already sent a care pack or provided part of the service, we may charge for what was supplied before you cancelled.

If we change the price or what the plan includes, we will email you before the change takes effect so you can cancel before you are charged again.

9. If your tree arrives dead or damaged

Your tree should arrive alive, healthy and as described. If it does not, email hello@deathtree.co.uk with your order number and a photograph or two, and keep the packaging if you can. We will replace the tree or refund you, whichever you prefer, and we pay the cost of returning it.

That is your right under the Consumer Rights Act 2015: goods must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described.

Once your tree has arrived safely and settled in, its health depends on its position, the weather, pests, disease and day-to-day care, none of which we control. A tree that fails later is not automatically replaced. You are welcome to buy a replacement, and your record keeps the original tree’s chapter and links the new tree to it, so the story stays honest. Any support beyond the position in this section would have to be agreed with you in writing.

10. Your certificate and tree record

Your record is a place in your account that holds:

your tree’s identity — its number, the name you give it and any dedication;
a photo timeline and growing notes;
private details you do not have to share with anyone: where the tree is, how to get to it, and your wishes;
an optional public certificate page, which is off unless you switch it on and can be switched off again;
a printable certificate and an export of everything in the record.

To be completely clear about what the record is not:

It is not a will and has no legal effect on what happens to your estate. Make a will with a solicitor or a qualified will writer.
It is not a land title, deed or any interest in land. It gives you no right over the land your tree grows on, and it does not register anything.
It is not a funeral plan or a prepaid funeral, and it is not regulated as one. We take no money towards a funeral and hold nothing on account.
It is not a carbon certificate, offset or environmental guarantee. Carbon is recorded as Not measured.
It is not financial, legal or tax advice. Nothing on this site should be relied on as advice about your affairs.

Placing ashes, or planting a tree anywhere other than your own garden, needs the landowner’s permission and sometimes other consents. Your record can set out what you would like to happen. It cannot arrange it, and it cannot bind anybody to it.

11. We never contact anyone automatically

Your record can name a person you would like to be spoken to one day, with their relationship to you and a note. Those fields exist so the record is complete for whoever eventually reads it.

Nothing in our system emails, writes to or telephones that person. There is no death detection, no inactivity trigger and no automatic release of your wishes. If someone tells us you have died, a person here will handle it with your family, carefully and by hand.

12. Your account and acceptable use

You sign in with a link emailed to you, or with Google or Apple if you prefer. There is no password to lose, which means your email account is the key: please keep it secure and tell us if you think someone else has had access to it.

Everything you add to your record must be yours to add and lawful. Please do not upload photographs you do not have permission to share, other people’s personal details without a reason to hold them, or anything abusive or unlawful. You keep ownership of what you write and upload; you give us permission to store it and show it back to you, and to show it on a public certificate page if and only if you switch one on.

We may remove unlawful content or suspend an account that is being misused, and we will tell you why whenever we are able to.

13. Our responsibility to you

If we fail to use reasonable care and skill, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of that failure. Loss or damage is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if we both knew it might when you ordered.

We do not exclude or limit our liability in any way where it would be unlawful:

for death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
for breach of your legal rights about the goods, including that they must be as described, of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose;
for defective products under the Consumer Protection Act 1987.

We are not responsible for:

damage to or loss of a tree after it has been delivered safely, where the cause is the position it was given, weather, pests, disease or care;
loss caused by you not following the growing guidance we supply, or by planting in a place that cannot support the tree;
business losses — the shop is for personal use, so we have no liability for loss of profit, loss of business or business interruption.

Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights, including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. If anything here conflicts with those rights, your rights come first.

14. Events outside our control

Weather, plant disease, a courier failure or a network outage can stop us dispatching on time. If that happens we will contact you as soon as we can and agree a new date, or refund you if you would rather not wait. We will not be liable for a delay caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control, but you can always cancel and be refunded if a delay is substantial.

15. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms — for example to reflect a change in the law or in how the shop works. The version that applies to your order is the version published on the day you ordered, and the date at the top of this page tells you when it last changed. For DeathTree Care, we will email you before any change takes effect so you can cancel if you do not agree to it.

16. Complaints

If something has gone wrong, email hello@deathtree.co.uk with your order number and what happened, and we will work with you to put it right.

Being straightforward about it: we are not currently a member of an alternative dispute resolution scheme or a trade association, so we cannot point you at one. You keep every legal route open to you, including the courts, and Citizens Advice can give you free guidance on consumer rights.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England & Wales, and you and we can both bring legal proceedings in the courts of England & Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your own country’s courts.

These terms, together with our delivery terms, cancellation and returns terms, privacy notice and cookie notice, are the whole agreement between us about your order.