Flax Plant £1 (1986 and 1991)

Worn coins of either date sell for little more than face value, even though the 1986 flax pound had a far smaller circulation issue than the 1991 coin. The 1986 date is still the one collectors pick out, so check it first. Condition then sets the price: a coin kept in a brilliant uncirculated pack or year set, with crisp flowers and roots, is worth more than any coin taken from change, and proofs sit above both.

With 48,853,076 struck for circulation, the Flax Plant £1 is the fourteenth rarest of the 26 ranked £1 designs and has the 160th lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Common band, for mintages 10,000,000 or more.

The next rarer £1 is the Forth Railway Bridge £1, with 39,162,000 struck, and the next more common is the Bees £1, with 72,505,000 struck.

Its lowest circulation mintage was in 1986, with 10,409,501 struck.

The flax plant £1 shows a spray of thin stems with small open flowers and buds, fanning out above a crown, with roots below and ONE POUND along the bottom. The leek, thistle and oak coins share the crown, so the flowers are the giveaway. Check the date beside the Maklouf portrait: 1986 is the scarcer year and 1991 the common one. The edge should read DECUS ET TUTAMEN, the same inscription as the oak tree £1 coin.

Northern Ireland's turn in the national emblem series came in 1986, after the Scottish thistle of 1984 and the Welsh leek of 1985. Leslie Durbin, the silversmith who designed all four coins of this first series, chose a flax plant for Northern Ireland. On the coin the plant is shown in full. Slender, leafy stems spray out in a fan, tipped with open flowers and a few buds, and they gather into a single stalk threaded through the Royal Diadem. Below the diadem the roots twist out across the field, and ONE POUND runs around the lower rim. Raphael Maklouf's portrait of the Queen is on the other side. The edge inscription is DECUS ET TUTAMEN, 'an ornament and a safeguard', the same Latin phrase used on the Royal Arms £1 of 1983. It ends with the cross crosslet mint mark, the sign of Llantrisant in South Wales, where The Royal Mint has been based since 1968. The flax design was struck again, unchanged, in 1991.

In the floral emblem set it followed the Leek £1 of 1985 and came before the Oak Tree £1 of 1987.