River-Stone Garden Marker

Our signature keepsake. Each stone is hand-picked from a single curve of river in Vermont or Yorkshire ??? tumbled smooth by a hundred winters of water, glacial in origin, ancient long before any of us. We choose them one at a time, by hand, by weight, by the way light falls on the grain.

Once chosen, the stone is taken to the workshop and engraved with the name, the dates and a single line of your choosing. The QR is then sealed beneath sapphire-glass on the underside and bonded with marine-grade resin ??? the same technique used on offshore navigational marks. Touch a phone against the underside and the full memorial unfolds: photographs, stories, voice notes, the whole shape of a life. The face of the stone stays exactly what it has been for a thousand years.

Salt-spray tested for the equivalent of forty winters. Frost-cycle tested, sun-tested, mud-tested. If the bonding ever loosens, we re-bond it for free, for as long as you need it. The memorial behind the QR is hosted in a separate legal trust, in perpetuity ??? Memory QR could close tomorrow and your stone would still open the same way it does today.

It arrives wrapped in a wool-felt envelope, tied with cotton ribbon, with a handwritten card from the maker who finished it. Many of our owners place these at the graveside, by a tree they loved, on the windowsill, at the end of the garden where they liked to lie in the sun. There is no wrong place for one.