About
What this is
Heartwood Groves is a website for trees planted in memory of people. Each tree carries a small tag. Scan it with your phone and you get a page about the person the tree remembers: their name, their dates, photos, the story of their life, and tributes from people who knew them.
The name comes from the wood itself. Heartwood is the dense core of a tree, no longer living, but it is what holds the trunk upright. That seemed like the right word for this.
How to use it
If you're standing at a tree, point your phone's camera at the tag. No app, nothing to type. The memorial opens in your browser.
From anywhere else, start at the front page and search by name. Every memorial in an unlocked grove is listed there.
Each memorial has a tribute form at the bottom. Write a memory, sign it or don't. It goes on the page the moment you send it. The one exception is a tribute with a web address in it, which waits for the grove's caretaker to read it first.
If you know the memorial but can't find the tree, the page can guide you. "Guide me to this tree" reads your location and points the way, and it keeps working where cell coverage doesn't, because GPS doesn't need any.
Some groves are locked. Their pages stay out of search engines and off the front page, and the tag itself carries the key, so scanning still works. If a shared link asks you for a key, ask whoever shared it.
Starting your own grove
This site can hold more than one grove. If you look after a memorial garden, a churchyard, a woodland, or a single tree, and you'd like pages like these for it, write to us.
There's no signup form, on purpose. This site is small and run by a person, and every grove starts with a conversation about what you're memorializing and who will look after the pages. Once yours exists, you sign in as its caretaker, create the memorials yourself, and print QR tags straight from the site to fix to your trees.
Contact
For anything at all: contact@heartwoodgroves.org. A real person reads it. To ask that a memorial come down, use Request a removal instead, which reaches the same person with the details already in front of them.