A single palm rises from a brown-scaled trunk at the centre, four bold pink blooms at the rim — hand-painted in Caldas da Rainha, carrying a motif that travelled from Moorish Andalusia to a Portuguese atelier centuries before it reached this set of 4 Arabella Dinner Plates. 

The palm tree is one of our collectors' favourite designs, from our best-selling tablecloth to the palm tree plates, its a popular one for the ages.

The palm tree arrived in European decorative arts as a symbol of everywhere Europeans wanted to be and could not quite reach. The Orientalists painted it first — grand, solitary, silhouetted against a desert sky — and the ceramicists followed, as ceramicists always do, borrowing from painters who borrowed from travellers who borrowed from the thing itself.

In the decorative tradition, the palm carries contradictory meanings with remarkable ease. To the ancient Egyptians, it marked the passage of time — one frond for every month of the year. To the Romans, it was victory. To the Arabs who cultivated it across North Africa and into Andalusia, it was simply life — shade, fruit, water found. The Moorish craftsmen who brought their tilework north into Portugal understood this. Their azulejos carried the palm not as a symbol but as a fact, the way you paint something you have grown up beside.

By the time it reached the drawing rooms of nineteenth-century Europe, the palm had become something else entirely — exotic, aspirational, a shorthand for warmth and distance and the particular glamour of a life lived closer to the equator than most people managed.