A warm, orange-brown fern leaf with a rich history is the inspiration for our new seasonal colour. From prehistoric fossils to custard cream motifs, author and colour expert Kassia St. Clair explores bracken’s expressive history.

The Victorian naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau once opined that ‘God created ferns to show what he could do with leaves’. A little overblown, you might think, but actually his praise was – for the era – rather restrained. From around 1830 until 1910, society on both sides of the Atlantic was gripped by ‘pteridomania’ – better known as fern fever. Appreciation for this large family of plants was seen as proof of intellect, even virility. Frond-like motifs and references appeared in art, interior decoration, literature, and even on custard cream biscuits. Wordsworth enthused about the ‘brilliant and various colours of the fern’ in the Lake District; Ruskin painted them in Perthshire. Enthusiasts – particularly women – travelled to Devon to collect rare specimens and then housed them in ‘Wardian cases’ (invented in 1829 as a means of transporting live plants, but later a fashionable means of displaying them) and custom-built ‘ferneries’.

Bracken is probably the most iconic fern species – the one with triangular arrangements of delicately branching fronds. It’s a very old (ancestors can be found in fossils dating back fifty-five million years) and large plant, growing up to two metres. Like most ferns, it doesn’t flower or generate seeds but instead reproduces with spores, like fungi. This method has evidently proved extraordinarily efficient: it has colonised almost all temperate and tropical regions of the globe and can quickly dominate a habitat. It’s bracken that you’ll see unfurling tender new fronds on verges and in woodland during the spring. Come October, bracken puts on a spectacle like no other: emerald leaves sliding softly through a suitably autumnal minor scale of gold, copper, russet, rust, chestnut and dun. Because of how widespread bracken is, such displays can cover landscapes as far as the eye can see.

The colour itself is an evocative one. It’s why Neptune has chosen to name its new seasonal shade Bracken. Orange softened with a touch of brown and mustard, it immediately recalls the changing of the seasons and autumn foliage, of course, but other things spring to mind too. The joy of late autumnal sunshine, pumpkins, Halloween, the glowing embers of a bonfire, and hot, spiced drinks gripped between gloved hands. A brighter, more vivacious cousin to perennially popular terracotta and clay-pink shades, it’s comforting, inviting and liveable, with a bold, contemporary edge. It feels subtly Victorian too: an off -beat allusion to all those Pre-Raphaelite redheads, Aesthetic Movement ‘art colours’, and the work of William Morris and his contemporaries. Exactly the kind of colour, in short, of which Henry David Thoreau would heartily approve.