Floral Scotland £1 (2014)

The thistle and bluebell pound had the smallest circulation issue of the four floral designs of 2013 and 2014, though only by a narrow margin, and worn coins still sell above face value. Condition sets the price: crisp florets on the thistle head and clean fields count for most. Coins kept in brilliant uncirculated condition are worth more than anything from change.

With 5,185,000 struck for circulation, the Floral Scotland £1 is the fourth rarest of the 26 ranked £1 designs and has the 108th lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Uncommon band, for mintages 2,500,000 to 9,999,999.

The next rarer £1 is the London £1, with 2,635,000 struck, and the next more common is the Floral England £1, with 5,270,000 struck.

A thistle head with jagged leaves across the top, and bluebells hanging from a curved stem to the right, is the Floral Scotland £1 coin. ONE POUND runs around the bottom. The 1984 and 1989 thistle pounds show a whole thistle plant rising through a crown with roots below, so the bluebells separate this design at a glance. Check the portrait side for the 2014 date and the edge for NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT, the inscription used on Scottish round pounds.

Noad's series ended in 2014 with Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scotland had been the first nation honoured on the round pound thirty years earlier, when Leslie Durbin's 1984 design showed a single thistle growing through the Royal Diadem. Noad kept the thistle and gave it a partner, the bluebell. A thistle head with bristling florets and spiny, deeply cut leaves stretches across the top of the coin, and below it a slender stem rises from the lower left and ends in hanging, bell-shaped flowers on the right. ONE POUND sits in widely spaced letters along the lower edge. Since the accession of King Charles III, Noad has taken on many royal heraldic commissions, among them the Royal Cypher, which the King chose from a series of designs Noad drew in different styles. Its edge bears NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT, Latin for 'no one attacks me with impunity', the same words used on the 1984 thistle, and the portrait is Ian Rank-Broadley's.

In the floral emblem set it was issued in 2014 together with the Floral Northern Ireland £1.