No trees and no diamonds or pencils. All you are doing is giving the people left behind something else to grieve over. Imagine losing the stone or the tree dying. It would be like a second funeral.

Best thing imo is to have the crematorium just scatter the ashes in their garden of remembrance. We took my dads ashes back without a plan of what to do with them and it hung over us for 5yrs before we finally scattered them in the park where he used to play as a child. When my mum passed away earlier this year she explicitly asked in her will to be scattered in the garden of remembrance. I’ll be doing the same.

Folk should know as well that it is a LOT of ash. I would say about 2-3kg in total. Scattering the ash is a bit like in the Big Lewbowski except with about 10x the volume. It helped in a dark humour sense because you do have to check the wind and what was an incredibly emotional moment was offset slightly by getting some ash in my eye. At least we thought my dad would have found that funny.