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The Relationship between Flower Essences and Plant Music

By Katherine Ziff

Briarwood Studios Flower Essences

Guest Contributer

Photograph of Edward Bach: AliceFlores [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

       Nearly a century ago, English physician Edward Bach gave up his thriving medical practice and groundbreaking homeopathic research and took to the forests, fields, and gardens of England to search for another approach to healing.

 

Prompted by a revelatory experience at a dinner party, in which he perceived a taxonomy of personality traits that he felt contributed to ill health, Dr. Bach spent the last seven years of his life out in the English countryside listening to flowers with his intuition and imagination. Through his research in the laboratory of Nature, Bach identified flowers corresponding with states of mind, made essences of the flowers with sunlight and water, tried them out on himself, and offered them to his patients. In all he originated 38 flower essences that address imbalance in emotional responses, all of which remain in use today.

 

Since then many more flower essences have been developed and used worldwide.

What exactly are flower essences? They are infusions, or tinctures, taken topically or orally a few drops at a time. The infusions are made from fresh blossoms of forest, field and garden in water and sunlight, through which they take on the imprint or electrical pattern of the flower. Flower essences work through the body’s electrical system and are considered a form of energy healing,

 

And what does electricity have to do with the workings of the human body? Amber Plante breaks it down for us in a 2016 article for the University of Maryland Graduate School’s Grad Gazette: Electricity is required for our nervous system to send signals throughout the body and to the brain that make it possible for us to move, think, and feel. This electricity is generated by our bodies’ cells using the elements available- sodium, calcum, potassium, etc.

 

I imagine our body’s cells as tiny turbines, powered by elements derived from food we eat, plant medicine, vitamins, and other medicines. Any disruption or imbalance in the electrical pathways maintained by our cells can affect how we think and feel.

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A flower essence works to balance our emotional response according to the properties of the flower from which it is made. For instance, Five Flower (also known as Rescue Remedy) bring calmness and stability in an emergency or a situation of severe stress. Made from the flowers of Cherry, Plum, Clematis, Impatiens, Rock Rose and Star of Bethlemen, Dr. Bach used an early version of his remedy to save the life of a near-frozen and half-dead shipwrecked sailor washed ashore in Cromer on the east coast of England.

 

Five Flower and all the English essences developed by Bach are part of the flower essence library in my practice. I use the Bach essences that are made in England by Healingherbs English Flower Essences and offered in the U.S. by Flower Essence Services.

 

If Dr. Bach were here today he would be enchanted by Cimarron-Maz Collective’s work listening to Ginseng and other healing plants. A Telling of Ginseng brings us human stories of Panax Quinquefolius. The Collective also, with great sensitivity, listens to and electronically records Ginseng and brings us that music.

 

I imagine that Bach would immediately observe that both flower essences and plant music are derived from botanical electrical patterns. And certainly he would notice the kinship of the Collective’s research methods with his own: listening to nature with the means available. In his instance, his own finely developed intuition and in the Collective’s instance an electronic recording device paired with imagination, intuition, and storytelling.

 

Also in my imagination, Dr. Bach would agree that the next generation of flower healing may be just around the corner: libraries of plant and flower sound.

References

 

Flower Essence Services Healingherbs English Flower Essences: http://www.fesflowers.com/product-info/healingherbs-bach-essences/

 

Katherine Ziff, Flower Essence Practitioner, is on Facebook @ Briarwood Studios Flower Essences

https://www.facebook.com/Briarwood-Studios-Flower-Essences-554640105052765/?modal=admin_todo_tour

 

Plante, Amber (2016). How the body uses electricity. Grad Gazette. Baltimore, MD: University of Maryland Graduate School.

 

Weeks, Nora (1994). The medical discoveries of Edward Bach, physician. New Canaan CT: Keats Publishing, Inc.

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