In 2007, The Queen attended events celebrating the 400^th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States of America.

This plaque was specially commissioned from artist and ceramic historian Michelle Erickson. Her design symbolises the meeting of English and Virginian Indian cultures. The rose of England and the thistle of Scotland represent the two nations unified by James I, who gave his name to the settlement. They are copied from an early seventeenth-century copper coin excavated in Jamestown.

The two figures are based on a drawing of Virginian Indians made by Englishman John White in 1585. White deliberately portrayed the figures in the style of Adam and Eve, and this reference to the Garden of Eden hints at the abundance of their environment, as well as the potentially disastrous effects of intrusion into paradise by settlers.

Erickson sourced a red-firing clay for the plaque from the nearby Chickahominy River, a material used by indigenous peoples and later by colonial potters. The woven motif on the rim mimics the border of a 1590 map of Virginia by Dutchman Theodor de Bry.