When a pet dies, the whole house feels different. The quiet by the food bowl, the empty spot on the couch, the way the yard suddenly looks a little too big without them running across it—all of it can make grief feel very close. For many families, creating a small outdoor space in their honor becomes a gentle way to keep that love rooted in something living and visible. A pet memorial garden does not have to be large or elaborate. It can be a corner of your yard, a strip beside the driveway, or even a few thoughtfully arranged containers on a balcony. What matters most is that it feels like “their” place.
As more families choose cremation for both people and pets, it is natural to ask what to do with ashes and how a garden might fit into that picture. Cremation is now the most common form of disposition in the U.S.; according to the Cremation Association of North America, the U.S. cremation rate reached 61.8% in 2024 and is projected to rise to 67.9% by 2029. The National Funeral Directors Association projects that cremation will continue to outpace burial, with a projected U.S. cremation rate of 63.4% in 2025 and long-term estimates approaching more than 80% in the 2040s. As more families receive urns back from the crematory, questions about cremation urns for ashes, pet urns for ashes, cremation jewelry, and keeping ashes at home naturally flow into questions about gardens, balconies, and outdoor memorial corners.
This guide walks you through how to turn whatever space you have—a backyard, a small patch of ground, or a modest patio—into a pet memorial garden that feels loving, practical, and sustainable over time.
Why an Outdoor Memorial Can Feel So Healing
Pets live so much of their lives outdoors: sniffing the same patch of grass, watching birds from the window, basking in the one strip of sunlight on the porch. Creating a memorial in nature often feels more like continuing a relationship than closing a chapter. A dedicated spot outside can give you somewhere to “go” with your grief even when there is no formal grave or cemetery plot.
Many families already have or are considering cremation urns, pet cremation urns, or cremation necklaces as part of their broader funeral planning. Funeral.com’s article “Cremation Urns, Pet Urns, and Cremation Jewelry: A Gentle Guide to Keeping Ashes Close” explores how cremation urns for ashes, keepsake urns, pet urns, and jewelry can be combined with home memorials and rituals in everyday life. A garden is a natural extension of those ideas: another place where love can land.
An outdoor memorial can be as structured or relaxed as you need it to be. For some, it looks like a defined bed with edging, a plaque, and a central plant. For others, it is a simple container with a favorite flower and a small pet memorial plaque tucked into the soil. There is no right level of “fancy.” What matters is that it feels like a place you can visit without pressure, where memories of your pet can show up alongside new growth.
Choosing the Right Spot: Yard Corner, Fence Line, or Balcony
Before you pick out plants or stones, it helps to decide where your DIY pet memorial garden will live. Walk through your space and notice where you naturally pause. Maybe it is the corner where your dog always napped in the sun, the stretch of fence where your cat watched birds, or simply the bit of yard you see most often from the kitchen window. If you live in an apartment, look at your balcony, a front stoop, or even a sunny windowsill where a compact grouping of pots could become a balcony or container memorial garden.
If you are thinking about burying your pet’s body in the garden or physically burying ashes, it is important to understand the legal and safety side first. Funeral.com’s guide “A Helpful Guide on How to Bury a Pet in Your Backyard Legally” walks through local rules, water table considerations, and practical steps for burying a pet at home in a way that is both safe and respectful. For many families, that article becomes a starting point for thinking about whether the garden will include a grave, a buried urn, a scattering area, or simply a symbolic memorial with no remains in the soil.
If your pet has been cremated and you are leaning toward keeping ashes at home rather than burying a body, Funeral.com’s article “Keeping Ashes at Home: How to Do It Safely, Respectfully, and Legally” offers a gentle overview of where urns can be placed indoors, what to consider with children and visitors, and where local regulations usually come into play. That same thinking applies to outdoor memorials: the garden should feel safe, stable, and compatible with your long-term plans.
On a balcony or small patio, space is naturally limited, but meaning is not. A cluster of containers with favorite flowers, a small statue that reminds you of your pet, and a discreet spot for a pet keepsake cremation urn or a piece of cremation jewelry when you are not wearing it can still create a powerful sense of presence.
Deciding How Ashes Fit Into the Garden
Once you have a general location in mind, the next question is how, or whether, ashes will be part of the garden itself. There is no single “correct” answer. Some families feel strongly about burying ashes in a garden or scattering pet ashes at home. Others prefer to keep the main urn inside and treat the garden as a symbolic extension of that indoor memorial.
One approach is to keep a primary urn indoors while placing a small token outdoors. Funeral.com’s Pet Cremation Urns for Ashes collection offers a range of styles for the main memorial, while smaller pieces from the Pet Keepsake Cremation Urns for Ashes collection can hold a tiny portion of ashes and be placed in a sheltered outdoor lantern or weather-protected niche. Families who prefer a figurative tribute may gravitate toward the Pet Figurine Cremation Urns for Ashes collection, where a lifelike sculpture doubles as an urn and can be displayed near a garden window or porch where it is visible from outside.
If you are drawn to small cremation urns or keepsake urns because you want a compact memorial that can move with you, Funeral.com’s Keepsake Cremation Urns for Ashes collection includes designs that pair well with garden themes—floral motifs, nature-inspired colors, and pieces that sit comfortably on a windowsill overlooking the yard. These smaller urns are often easier to work into a garden-adjacent shrine without exposing them directly to weather.
Some families choose to scatter a portion of ashes into the soil while still keeping some in an urn or cremation necklace. If you are considering scattering more broadly, Funeral.com’s article “Scattering Ashes: Laws, Locations, and Meaningful Ideas for Saying Goodbye” can help you understand local rules and imagine locations beyond your own yard, including parks, favorite hiking spots, or designated scattering gardens. For those drawn to water, the water burial guide, “Understanding What Happens During a Water Burial Ceremony”, explains how water burial works, what kinds of urns are suitable, and how families often combine water-based rituals with a home or garden memorial.
There is room for more than one idea at once. You might keep the majority of ashes in a beautiful indoor urn, place a tiny portion in cremation jewelry from Funeral.com’s Cremation Jewelry collection, and add a symbolic pinch to the soil around a favorite rose bush. The garden then becomes one part of a larger, layered answer to what to do with ashes, rather than the only place they “belong.”
If You Are Still Choosing an Urn or Cremation Jewelry
Sometimes the garden idea arrives before any other decision. You know you want a place outside that feels like your pet, but you are still figuring out which pet urns for ashes, small cremation urns, or cremation necklaces make sense for you financially and emotionally.
If you are comparing options, Funeral.com’s guide “How Much Does Cremation Cost? Average Prices and Budget-Friendly Options” offers a clear breakdown of how much does cremation cost in different scenarios, including simple direct cremation followed by a separate memorial. NFDA data show that the median cost of a funeral with burial is significantly higher than a funeral with cremation, which is one reason so many families now choose cremation and then invest in meaningful memorial pieces instead.
For jewelry specifically, “Cremation Jewelry 101: What It Is, How It’s Made, and Who It’s Right For” walks through how cremation necklaces, bracelets, and charms are filled and sealed, how much they typically hold, and how to care for them. Pairing a piece from Funeral.com’s Cremation Necklaces collection with a garden space can be especially comforting: you might wear the necklace when you go outside to water plants or sit on a bench, then hang it in a safe spot indoors when you come back in.
Thinking through these choices first can help you design your garden around real objects and real routines, instead of abstract ideas.
Choosing Plants and Materials With Real Meaning
Once the practical questions about urns, ashes, and location are at least loosely settled, you can turn toward the tactile side of things: plants, stones, soil, and light. The phrase plants for pet memorials can mean almost anything that feels right for you.
Some people choose flowering perennials that return each year, like lavender, coneflowers, or daisies, because they like the idea of cyclical blooming. Others prefer evergreen shrubs or ornamental grasses that keep the space soft and present all year long. If your pet loved a particular season, you might lean into that: tulips and daffodils for a spring-loving dog who lived for park walks, or warm-toned foliage for a cat who always seemed to find the best autumn sun patches.
If you do not have a lot of gardening experience or live with health limitations, it is wise to keep things low maintenance. Drought-tolerant plants, native species, and hardy groundcovers can reduce the pressure to “keep it perfect.” The goal of a low maintenance memorial garden is not to impress anyone; it is to create a place you can visit without feeling guilty about weeds.
Materials like stone and wood add structure and symbolism without requiring constant upkeep. Garden stones with pet names, small pet memorial plaques, or engraved markers can sit at the heart of the space. Funeral.com’s article “From Collars to Paw Prints: Meaningful Memorial Ideas for a Pet Who Has Died” explores creative ways to incorporate collars, tags, and paw prints into memorials; many of those ideas translate naturally into garden décor, such as embedding a paw-print tile into a stepping stone or attaching a tag to a decorative stake near a plant.
If you are planting over a buried pet or a biodegradable urn, consider root systems and long-term growth. Deep-rooted trees directly over a burial may not be ideal in some soils, whereas smaller shrubs, grasses, or perennial flowers are usually gentler on the ground.
Personal Touches: Stones, Photos, Lights, and Paths
The details you add around the plants are often what make the garden feel like it truly belongs to your pet. Some families create a “memory path” with stepping stones, each one painted or inscribed with a word, a date, or a small drawing that captures their pet’s personality. Others tuck small figurines, wind chimes, or solar lights into the space.
Solar lights are especially meaningful in pet memorial garden ideas because they transform nighttime, which can be one of the loneliest periods of grief, into something quietly illuminated. A single soft light near a marker, or a row of tiny lights along a border, can make it easier to look out the window after dark and feel that your pet’s corner is not forgotten. When you are ready to add more structure, you might create a simple edge with small stones, or place a weather-safe photo in a protected frame.
If you like the idea of having your pet physically “present” in the garden without exposing an urn to the elements, a tiny amount of ashes can sometimes be sealed into a piece of cremation jewelry and hung on a protected hook under a covered porch, or tucked into a decorative box on an outdoor table that is brought inside in bad weather. A miniature pet keepsake urn can also sit inside a lantern, protected from direct rain and sun.
For very small pets, Funeral.com’s Small Pet Cremation Urns for Ashes collection includes pieces that can sit on a small garden shelf or inside a weather-sheltered niche. This allows the garden to feel like an extension of your pet urns for ashes, not a separate project you have to manage.
Involving Children in the Garden
For many families, children were deeply attached to the pet who has died. A pet memorial garden can become a practical, age-appropriate way for them to participate in saying goodbye and in staying connected over time.
You might invite a child to help choose a plant that “belongs” to the pet—a bright flower for a playful dog, a soft fern for a shy cat, a pot of catnip to honor a favorite treat. They can decorate stones with washable paints, write short messages on small wooden stakes, or help arrange tiny figures along the memory paths and stepping stones. Activities like these are more than “crafts”; they give children something to do with their feelings.
If you are looking for more kid-focused ideas, the broader Funeral.com Journal includes pet-loss and memorial articles that can be adapted for different ages, many of which are surfaced under tags like Guides & How-Tos and Funeral Planning. These pieces can help you find the right language when a child asks hard questions, and they can also reassure you that there is no single “correct” way for a child to grieve.
If your family is using keepsake urns or miniature pet urns for ashes, older children and teens may want their own small piece. They might keep it on a shelf in their room, place it in the garden within a safe container, or wear it occasionally as cremation jewelry. Letting them participate in those decisions reinforces that their grief is real and their relationship with the pet matters just as much as any adult’s.
Simple Rituals to Keep the Garden Alive Over Time
The day you first plant or arrange your pet memorial garden is important, but the small rituals that follow often do the deepest work. You might visit the garden on your pet’s birthday, adoption day, or the anniversary of their death, bringing a new plant, a ribbon in their collar’s color, or a small note you tuck under a stone. Some families read a short poem, others say a few words aloud, and others simply sit in silence and listen to the wind or the birds.
Over time, your routines might shift. In the first months, you might visit daily, watering plants and checking the garden stones with pet names. As grief softens, you might stop by once a week or simply notice the space in passing and feel a gentle warmth instead of sharp pain. The garden’s purpose is not to keep you locked in sorrow, but to give that love somewhere to live as your life continues.
The rest of your choices—whether to wear a cremation necklace, keep a keepsake urn on your desk, or explore options like water burial for part of the ashes—can evolve alongside the garden. Funeral.com’s funeral planning resources, including the Funeral Planning collection in The Journal, can help you consider next steps without losing sight of the pet at the heart of it all.
In the end, a pet memorial garden is less about landscaping and more about love. Whether you create a full flower bed or a single pot on a balcony, whether you incorporate urns and ashes or keep everything symbolic, you are carving out a place where memory and living things meet. Every time you water a plant, straighten a plaque, or pause at the edge of that space, you are answering the question of what to do with ashes and grief in the simplest way possible: you are tending them.
