A POLISHED COCO DE MER NUT (LODOICEA MALDIVICA)

mounted as a box, dark brown in colour, and with a hinged lid, raised on an oval wooden stand,

32cm high overall x 25cm wide

There is a long historical tradition of collecting Coco de Mer nuts and treasuring them as rare and unusual objects , as far back as the 16th century they were decorated with jewels and placed in 'cabinets of curiosities'. Their obvious resemblance to a woman's buttocks inspired their botanical name 'Lodoicea Callipyge"; "callipyge" meaning "beautiful rump" in Greek. Sailors would see them floating in the sea and supposedly mistook them for real women, others believed they grew on trees deep in the ocean and floated to the surface when ripe.