Montserrat  is a British Overseas Territory located in the Caribbean. The island is located in the Leeward Islands, part of the chain of islands known as the Lesser Antilles, in the West Indies. Montserrat is nicknamed The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean both for its resemblance to coastal Ireland and for the Irish ancestry of some of its inhabitants.

In November 1493 Christopher Columbus passed Montserrat in his second voyage, after being told that the island was unoccupied due to raids by the Caribs. Columbus named the island Santa María de Montserrat, after the Monastery of Montserrat in the Crown of Aragon (today Catalonia, Spain). The island came under English control in 1632 when anti-Catholic violence in Nevis forced a group of Irish transported from Ireland as slaves, to settle in Montserrat.

The colonists began to import African slaves for labour, as was common to most Caribbean islands. The colonists built an economy based on the production of sugar, rum, arrowroot and Sea Island Cotton, cultivated on large plantations manned by slave labor. By the late 1700s, numerous plantations had been developed on the island. Many Irish people were also transported to the island, to work as slaves, indentured servants or exiled prisoners; some were exiled during the English Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. On 17 March 1768 the slaves rebelled but failed to achieve freedom. The people of Montserrat celebrate St Patrick's Day as a public holiday due to the slave revolt.

In 1857, the British philanthropist Joseph Sturge bought a sugar estate to prove it was economically viable to employ paid labour rather than slaves. Numerous members of the Sturge family bought additional land. In 1869 the family established the Montserrat Company Limited and planted lime trees, started the commercial production of lime juice, set up a school, and sold parcels of land to the inhabitants of the island. Much of Montserrat came to be owned by smallholders.

From 1871 to 1958, Montserrat was administered as part of the federal crown colony of the British Leeward Islands.

This is one of the only coins ever produced by Montserrat and one of the few produced in the last decades. It is part of a series of Caribbean coins dedicated to the region's flora.