How we check what we publish.
Most of this is ordinary care rather than anything clever. It is written down because a standard nobody can see is a standard nobody can hold you to.
Prices we quote about other sellers
Every figure was read off that seller's own page, and the date it was read is printed beside it. We do not repeat a price from a comparison site, a press article or a search result, because those go stale silently and we would have no way of knowing.
Each row is marked either read directly or reported second-hand, andonly the directly read rows are ever shown. That is enforced in code, not by memory: the comparison reads from a function that filters the rest out. Of 6 sellers we have looked at, 3 are published and 3 held back for want of a direct check.
The figures currently shown were read on 20 September 2026. Prices move, and a stale price is the same problem as an unsourced one, so they are re-checked quarterly or dropped.The comparison itself is here, with a link to each seller so you can check us.
Claims about the trees
Mature heights, habit and growing needs come from published references — the Woodland Trust, the RHS and Forest Research — and each species page names the one it used.3 of our 4 trees cite a reference.
Cherry Blossom does not, and the page says so rather than quoting a figure. The ornamental cultivar is not confirmed until the grower agrees it before dispatch, and cherries vary enough between cultivars that a mature height printed in advance would be a guess wearing the clothes of a fact.
Care guidance is held to a harder test than that. A seasonal note is only written where there are at least three facts true of that species in that month and wrong if moved to another — generic advice does not count, and roughly a third of the possible notes are dropped rather than padded to fill the grid.
What we will not print
Some of these are enforced by a script that fails the build rather than by good intentions.
- No carbon figure. We have not done the work that would let us defend one, and the reasoning is set out in full inwhy we publish no carbon figure.
- No reviews, ratings or stars — real or otherwise. There are no customers yet to review anything. The build fails if rating markup appears anywhere in the site's structured data, which is the version of that promise a machine can keep.
- No urgency. No countdowns, no stock scarcity, no "before it is too late". On a product bought for reasons like these, manufactured urgency is a harm rather than a tactic. The banned phrases are in a list that fails the build.
- No VAT wording. Acorn Reserve Ltd is not VAT registered, so no VAT number or VAT-inclusive phrasing appears anywhere. Implying registration you do not have is an offence, not an oversight.
- No invented people. No fabricated founder story, no stock photograph presented as a customer, no composite anecdote told as if it happened.
- No survival guarantee. We do not promise any individual tree will outlive its owner, and the product pages say so where somebody is deciding.
If we have got something wrong
Tell us and we will correct it and say that we have. That applies to a price we have quoted about somebody else as much as to anything about our own trees — if you are a seller listed here and a figure is out of date, write to us and it will be fixed or removed.
More on who runs this, thequestions people ask before buying, andwhat a legacy tree is and is not.
