Index Palmarum

Hermes Histoires de Carres > Autumn - Winter 2019

This naturalistic scarf by Katie Scott was inspired by the pages of the Historia Naturalis Palmarum, a 19th-century treatise on palms by the German botanist, ethnographer and explorer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius. The astonishingly diverse forms and colours of this plant species, one of the oldest on earth, fire the imagination: is anything more creative than Mother Nature herself? Exploring the palm family in the tradition of botanical plates, the designer presents just a few specimens of the plant she describes as "the embodiment of exoticism".