Ink Review: Kaweco Palm Green

Palm Green is an ink I bought to be Mystery Ink Number 11, on Fountain Pen Geeks forum. I picked it because Kaweco is an ink brand I’d never used and don’t hear much about.

I used Palm Green in two pens for this review. One is the Jetpens Chibi, with a fine nib but a wet ink flow. And the other is a Montblanc 146 with a broad nib and a very wet ink flow. For the review, I used Tomoe River, Rhodia and Staples Sustainable Earth paper, but I’ve used it over the past weeks on all sorts of other paper as well.

Palm Green has behaved very well for me, with good ink flow, no skipping or hard starts, and a normal dry time.

With the Chibi, I saw only minimal showthrough on all papers, and no bleedthrough. I saw a tiny bit more showthrough using the broad Montblanc, but it was little enough that I had no trouble writing on both sides of the paper.

There was some feathering on my “Everything Feathers” copy paper — about average for that paper. I saw no feathering on any other paper.

I love how this ink shades. I even saw shading on the very thin and absorbent Sustainable Earth paper, which was a nice surprise.

And on Tomoe River paper, not only did I see shading, but also sheen.

Palm Green has very little water resistance. At the bottom of this Rhodia dot paper are two water tests. On the left is a rectangle of regular paper, which is more absorbent. That still has a remnant of Palm Green, albeit hard to read. On the right is the water test on the smoother Rhodia, which did not retain any ink exposed to water drops.

On the plus side, this made Palm Green easy to clean for me. It cleaned out quickly with just water flushing from the Montblanc, and even from the Jetpens Chibi, which I left inked for three weeks as a torture test. However, one of the volunteers on the MI-11 thread did find it harder to clean out of one converter, so that’s something to keep in mind.

Here are the results of paper towel chromatography on Palm Green.

Palm Green is available in 30 ml bottles or in short international cartridges. I paid $14 for my bottle, so it’s not the cheapest ink. J. Herbin ink is around $11 for the same size bottle, and Lierre Sauvage is a similar color. Montblanc Irish Green is $19 for 60 ml, and while a darker shade I think it occupies the same standard green niche.

I want to talk about comparable inks in more depth, so I’m going to break that out into a separate post. There are definitely some nice options among medium greens. I just happen to be smitten with Palm Green.