Plate, 10.5 inches diameter. Blue transfer with gilding. Printed and impressed maker's marks for Doulton & Co. This imaginative botanical sheet pattern features a profusion of bamboo stalks, palm fronds, and large stylized blooms with egrets and songbirds in flight contained within roundels. There is gilded decorations overlaying the transfer pattern, including leafy blooming prunus branches, circles filled with spirals, and stylized sunburst blooms. The border consists of a simple gilded line.

Doulton & Co. began as a partnership between John Doulton, Martha Jones, and John Watts at a factory in Lambeth, London in 1815. There, the business specialized in making stoneware articles, such as decorative bottles and salt glaze sewer pipes. Yet stoneware would be the making of this enterprise. The company took on the Doulton name in 1853 when John and his son Henry established themselves as makers of fine English stoneware. In 1877/1878 Doulton purchased a small factory from Pinder, Bourne & Co. at Nile Street in Burslem, Staffordshire, bringing Doulton right to the heart of The Potteries. Doulton became increasingly popular, thanks in large part to the artistic direction of John Slater, who worked across a wide variety of figurines, vases, character jugs, and decorative pieces. The works continued to be called Pinder, Bourne & Co. until early 1882, when it became Doulton & Co. Ltd. The sheer popularity of Doulton products also came to the attention of the Royal Family and in 1901 the Burslem factory was granted the Royal Warrant by the new King Edward VII. It was this that enabled the business to adopt a new backstamp and name: Royal Doulton.