Flower Essences · A Complete Guide to Making, Meeting and Practicing with Flowers

A flower essence is water that has held living flowers, usually floated in sunlight, then preserved and diluted. Edward Bach made the first by the sun method in 1930; makers on five continents have followed. This guide covers how essences are made, how they differ from oils and tinctures, the traditions and makers, and how people practice with them.

This page is the Global Spiritual Studies reference on flower essences. It is drawn from primary sources (Edward Bach's 1936 text and the Bach Centre's notes to it, the Flower Essence Society and Flower Essence Services, the makers' own published accounts, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, the published reviews of the clinical trials, and the recorded lessons of the Global Spiritual Studies course Flower Essence Shamanism), and where those sources disagree each view is shown and credited. Global Spiritual Studies teaches flower essences as a contemplative practice and makes no health claims.

What a flower essence is

A definition

A flower essence is a preparation made from fresh flowers and water. In the method most makers follow, freshly picked blooms are floated on the surface of a bowl of clear water and left in sunlight for a few hours. The flowers are then lifted out and the water is kept, preserved with alcohol and diluted again before it reaches a shop. A second method, which Edward Bach added in 1935, boils the flowering parts in water for half an hour instead. Flower Essence Services (FES), the California maker that has offered flower essences since 1979 and the sister company of the non-profit Flower Essence Society, covers both methods when it describes essences as infusions or decoctions.

The word essence can mislead. In perfumery an essence is a concentrated scent, and in cooking it is a strong flavoring. A flower essence is neither. FES notes that flower essences have no definite aroma, and that the most noticeable scent in the bottle comes from the preserving alcohol. Very little of the plant is used, and less still reaches the bottle: FES puts its stock bottles at about one part plant in six thousand.

What is in the bottle, and what is not

Flower essences are often shelved beside four other plant preparations, and confused with them. The five differ in how they are made, and so in what is physically in the bottle.

Table G · Preparations at a glance. The table compares methods of making only and makes no comparison of effects. Each preparation, with its method, label and history, is set out in Flower Essences vs Essential Oils, Tinctures, Hydrosols and Homeopathy.

The comparison with homeopathy is the one most often blurred, because the two traditions share a history: Bach practiced as a homeopath, and his first three flower preparations were homeopathic. FES calls the two kindred preparations and agrees that both are physically diluted. What it says separates them is that flower essences were not developed from homeopathy's law of similars, and that it makes them only from fresh blossoms, while homeopathic preparations draw on many plant, mineral and animal sources. The full comparison is on What Is a Flower Essence?

What makers say is in the water

If almost nothing of the plant is in the bottle, what do makers say is there? The Bach Centre puts it most simply: in both of Bach's methods, it says, the heat transfers energy in the flowers to the water. FES draws its line against essential oils, calling the oil a physical extract and the essence a subtle energy extract. It also describes essences as potentized, a word borrowed from homeopathy, where it names the combined process of serial dilution and shaking. Later writers, beginning with Gurudas's Flower Essences and Vibrational Healing (1983), speak of a vibrational quality. And the oldest word in the vocabulary, signature, comes from the doctrine of signatures, described in section 5.

All of this is the language of a practice, not a measurement. It does not report a substance that a laboratory could find.

How many flower essences exist

No one keeps a complete count. Bach's set is closed at 38, and the Dr Edward Bach Centre works only with those. The later makers keep open repertories that grow as they add flowers from their own regions. Flower Essence Services sells its own range, Quintessentials, as a 103-bottle professional kit. Australian Bush Flower Essences lists between 69 and 71 essences, depending on the count. South African Flower Essences lists 151 single essences, and Bloesem Remedies Nederland 48. Clare G. Harvey's The Practitioner's Encyclopedia of Flower Remedies (2020 edition) describes 33 families of flower essences and more than 2,000 products, which gives a sense of how far the field has spread since 1936.

How flower essences are sold and labeled

Most essences reach buyers as small dropper bottles at the stock stage. A typical label shows the flower's name and the preservative: brandy, grape alcohol or vegetable glycerin. UK retailers list the label of Nelsons' five-flower Rescue formula as grape alcohol at about 27 percent by volume, a figure that comes from retail listings rather than the maker. Alcohol-free versions exist, mostly at the later stages; the Bach Centre mentions remedies suspended in vegetable glycerin and notes that their mother tinctures are still preserved in alcohol. Flower Essence Services prints a best-by date of up to ten years on its stock bottles, which it says regulations require, and states that its statements have not been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration.

The legal status of the bottles differs by maker and country. In the United States, Nelsons' Bach Original Flower Remedies carry over-the-counter drug labels listed in the National Library of Medicine's DailyMed database under Nelson Bach USA Limited, in the marketing category “unapproved homeopathic”. In the United Kingdom, the Court of Appeal dismissed Bach Flower Remedies Ltd's appeal against Healing Herbs in October 1999, and Flower Essence Services reports that the name Bach Flower Remedies is no longer a UK trademark, so several makers sell the 38 side by side. Neither a drug listing nor a trademark ruling is an evaluation of what the essences do.

How a flower essence is made

Every maker since 1930 has worked from one of Bach's two methods, and most from the first: flowers and water, warmth from the sun or from boiling, then the flowers removed and the water preserved.

The sun method

In the final edition of The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies (1936), Bach describes what he called the sunshine method. A thin glass bowl is almost filled with the purest water to hand, ideally from a nearby spring. Blooms are picked and floated at once to cover the surface, then left in bright sun for three or four hours, or less if they begin to fade. The blooms are lifted out, and the water is poured into bottles and topped up with brandy. The Bach Centre today gives three hours in direct sunlight. Flower Essence Services says its blossoms are picked fresh, early on a clear, sunny morning, and names the attention of the person making the essence as part of the process. Later makers' methods are compared in section 4.

The boiling method

For the boiling method, which Bach added in 1935, the flowering parts are boiled in clean water for half an hour, strained and cooled, and brandy is added in the same way. For most of the boiled plants Bach used the blossom with small pieces of stem and, when present, young leaves; for Chestnut Bud he used the buds. One of his 38, Rock Water, is spring water alone. Bach's booklet gives no reason why some plants were boiled and others sunned. The explanation usually given, that delicate flowers suit the sun while woodier plants and those that bloom when the sun is weak suit boiling, is the Bach Centre's later account.

Table A · Sun vs boiling. Sources: Edward Bach, The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies (1936), in the Bach Centre's 1941 edition; the Dr Edward Bach Centre; Flower Essence Services. The step-by-step version, with examples of each method, is in How to Make a Flower Essence.

The three bottles

Bach went straight from the infused water to the small bottle a person uses. The Bach Centre's editors note that the usual process has three stages and that Bach probably left out the middle one, the stock bottle, for people making their own. The mother essence (the Bach Centre says mother tincture) is the infused water with its preservative. The stock bottle, which is what shops sell, holds a few drops of mother essence in brandy or another preservative. The dosage bottle holds a few drops of stock in water and is made up at home. Flower Essence Services gives its ratios exactly: one part plant to ten of water at the mother stage, then one to two in alcohol, and one to three hundred from mother essence to stock, which puts the stock bottle at about one part in six thousand counting back to the plant.

Table F · Mother, stock and dosage bottles, one maker per row. Sources: Bach (1936) and the Bach Centre's notes; the Dr Edward Bach Centre; Flower Essence Services. Each maker's directions for using its own bottles belong to that maker; this table records how the bottles are made.

Preservatives

Brandy is the traditional preservative because Bach used it, and the Bach Centre still uses it. Other makers choose other spirits or none: grape alcohol at Flower Essence Services, organic cognac (a French brandy) at Healing Herbs, by its own account, an organic biodynamic brandy at Alaskan Essences, cognac at Bloesem Remedies Nederland, and red shiso with a little vinegar at Green Hope Farm in New Hampshire. Vegetable glycerin appears in alcohol-free lines, and both the Bach Centre and FES mention cider vinegar for a dosage bottle.

Picking flowers safely and lawfully

Every method begins with a living plant, so the plant and the law come before the recipe. Many places protect wild plants by law. In Great Britain, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 makes it an offense to pick, uproot or destroy any plant listed in its Schedule 8, and, unless you are an authorized person such as the landowner, to uproot any wild plant at all. In US national parks, federal rules forbid removing or disturbing plants or their parts, apart from certain fruits, berries and nuts that a superintendent may allow visitors to gather by hand. On private land, ask the owner first.

Some flowers are harmful to handle. Buttercup is one: the fresh plant releases an irritating oil, protoanemonin, that can blister skin. The North American trumpet vine is commonly called cow itch, because contact with the plant can bring a rash to some people. Know exactly what a plant is before you handle it, and take little: Bach's bowl needed only enough blooms to cover its surface. Some makers and teachers also ask the plant before they pick, a practice described in section 5; a question of that kind belongs to a relationship with the plant and never replaces the law or a landowner's permission.

Edward Bach and the 38

Who Bach was

Edward Bach (1886 to 1936) was an English physician and homeopath. Born at Moseley, near Birmingham, he qualified as a doctor in 1912, and from 1919 to 1928 he worked at the London Homoeopathic Hospital, where he developed the seven Bach nosodes with John Paterson and Charles Wheeler. His first remedies date from 1928 to 1930, and the first three (Impatiens, Mimulus, Clematis) were homeopathic preparations. He found the sun method in 1930 and the boiling method in 1935, and the 38 were complete by 1936.

From 1930 he traveled England and Wales with Nora Weeks, and in April 1934 he settled at Mount Vernon, Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, now the Dr Edward Bach Centre. His life is set out in full in Edward Bach and the Bach Flower Remedies.

Timeline (compact). Sources: the Bach Centre's 1941 edition of The Twelve Healers and its editors' notes; the Dr Edward Bach Centre; Flower Essence Services, “History of the Bach Flower Essences”. The full sequence, from Bach to every later maker, is in The History of Flower Essences.

From twelve to nineteen to thirty-eight

Bach's system grew in three steps: the Twelve Healers by 1932, four helpers in the autumn of 1933 and seven in July 1934, then the last nineteen in 1935, almost all by the boiling method. Popular summaries often conflate the 1933 and 1934 editions and put all seven helpers in 1933.

Twelve, nineteen, thirty-eight. Source: the Bach Centre's 1941 edition of The Twelve Healers and its editors' notes. The editors do not name the helpers by year, so the table gives 1933 to 1934 for all seven. All 38, with Bach's headings, Latin names and methods, are on the free Bach's 38 Flower Remedies chart.

The seven headings, as history

In the 1936 edition Bach arranged the 38 under seven headings, which are quoted here as history: For Fear; For Uncertainty; For Insufficient Interest in Present Circumstances; For Loneliness; For Those Over-Sensitive to Influences and Ideas; For Despondency or Despair; and For Over-care for Welfare of Others. Bach told his readers to take no notice of the disease and to think only of the outlook on life of the person, and the headings name states of mind. Global Spiritual Studies records them as part of the history of the tradition. It does not match flowers to conditions and makes no claim for any of the 38.

The five-flower rescue formula

Bach's best-known combination mixes five of the 38 in equal parts: Rock Rose, Impatiens, Clematis, Star of Bethlehem and Cherry Plum. The Bach Centre calls it Bach's rescue formula and says it is the only premixed combination it recommends. A story in many books dates its first use to the early 1930s, but Star of Bethlehem and Cherry Plum were not found until 1935, so the five-flower form cannot be older than that. Rescue Remedy and Rescue are registered trademarks of Bach Flower Remedies Ltd, part of the Nelsons group; Flower Essence Services sells its version as Five-Flower Formula.

After Bach

After Bach's death, Nora Weeks and Victor Bullen kept his work going at Mount Vernon. According to Flower Essence Services, Nelsons took over bottling in 1991 and bought the Bach remedy business in 1993; the Centre stayed separate, and today it teaches, publishes Bach's texts and keeps the set closed at 38. In 1988 the late Julian Barnard (1947 to 2026), who learned preparation from Nickie Murray, founded Healing Herbs to make all 38 by Bach's own methods, and his company won the British trademark case that followed. One of the original twelve, the blue roadside flower chicory, is profiled from botany to folklore in Chicory Flower Essence.

Makers and traditions since Bach

For about four decades after 1936 the field was almost entirely Bach's 38. From the late 1970s new makers appeared on several continents, most of them using the sun method on the flowers of their own regions. Many of the lines were founded or are led by women: Lila Devi, Kadambii Barnao, Patricia Kaminski, Sabina Pettitt, Cynthia Athina Kemp Scherer, Machaelle Small Wright, Molly Sheehan, Marion Leigh and Jannet Unite-Penny.

North America

Richard Katz founded the Flower Essence Society in 1979, and Patricia Kaminski has co-directed it since 1980. The Society is a non-profit membership organization that publishes the Flower Essence Repertory and runs a Practitioner Certification Program; Flower Essence Services is the company that grows, makes and sells the essences. Spirit-in-Nature Essences (1977), Alaskan Essences, Pacific Essences, Desert Alchemy, Perelandra and Green Hope Farm are dated in the table below. David Dalton founded Delta Gardens in the mid-1980s, by the maker's own account. His publisher places it in New Hampshire, and a testimonial on the maker's site mentions his garden at Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Britain and Europe

In Britain the 38 are made by Nelsons and by Healing Herbs, whose essences Flower Essence Services has distributed in North America since 1991. Marion Leigh founded Findhorn Flower Essences on the Moray coast of Scotland in 1993 by the most detailed founding account, or in 2000 by SourceWatch, which dates Leigh's return to the Findhorn Community to 1992. The Bailey family have made flower essences at Ilkley in Yorkshire for fifty years, by the maker's own account, and a local business listing dates the start to 1967, with Dr Arthur Bailey. In March 2016 the essences passed to Yorkshire Flower Essences Ltd, which still makes them in Ilkley.

Australia, Africa and Asia

Ian White founded Australian Bush Flower Essences in 1986 by the company's account, or 1987 by an interview account. Vasudeva Barnao began Living Essences of Australia in 1977 and, after moving to Perth in 1980, developed its range from the wildflowers of Western Australia with Kadambii Barnao. In South Africa, Jannet Unite-Penny makes South African Flower Essences on the slopes of Table Mountain. Every line, with its founder, base, method and size, is compared in Flower Essence Makers and Traditions, and the dates are set in sequence in The History of Flower Essences.

Table C · Major makers. “Not stated in sources consulted” means the maker's published pages checked in October 2026 did not say. Where founding dates differ, both are given and credited. Bailey Essences and Delta Gardens are described in the text above. The long form, with preservatives and a source column, is in Flower Essence Makers and Traditions.

Plants as teachers

Flower essence makers are one line among several that approach a plant as more than material. The others come from botany, the study of religion, herbal practice and shamanism, and they share a posture: a plant is approached as someone rather than something.

Plant spirit traditions

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, sets out the Honorable Harvest in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), guidelines that begin with asking permission and end with a gift in return. The scholar of religion Graham Harvey, in Animism (2005), describes animists as people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of them human. The herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote across several books of perceiving plants through the heart, and Eliot Cowan's Plant Spirit Medicine (1995) describes making contact with a plant's spirit and asking for its help. Science has not shown that plants converse with people in the way practitioners describe, and this guide does not claim that they do. What these sources describe plainly is a practice: what people say to plants, what they listen for, and what they offer in return.

The doctrine of signatures, in brief

The doctrine of signatures held that a plant's form, color or habitat is a sign of its nature, set there to be read. Its origins are debated. It is usually traced to Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, and Jakob Böhme's Signatura Rerum (1621 in most accounts, 1622 in some) gave it its name; William Coles applied it in an English herbal, The Art of Simpling, in 1656. The ethnobotanist Bradley Bennett (2007) argues that it served to remember and pass on plant knowledge rather than to discover it. The word survives in flower essence teaching, and the Flower Essence Society's Twelve Windows of Plant Perception, by Patricia Kaminski and Richard Katz, asks for the same kind of unhurried attention to a plant's form, color, growth and place.

Asking, listening, giving back

Read across the sources, the practice comes down to three moves, and not every tradition makes all three. Asking is where they disagree most: Kimmerer puts it first, Cowan asks for help rather than permission, and Bach's 1936 instructions go straight from the bowl of water to the bloom. Listening is rarely described as hearing a voice, and giving back is the most uneven, as the table shows. Trees hold a similar place in modern Druidry, which draws on the medieval reading of the Ogham letters as tree names, as the Druidry guide describes.

Table H · Ways traditions approach plants. Each row is drawn from the named source; the course row is described in sections 6 and 10. The full account, with what the practice is not, is in Plant Spirit Communication.

The four elemental flowers

One way of working with flowers leaves the bottle aside entirely. In Flower Essence Shamanism, the Global Spiritual Studies course taught by Gina Kearney, four flowers are paired with the four elements: Nicotiana for Earth, Trumpet Vine for Air, Cayenne for Fire and Fuchsia for Water. Each is met in its own lesson, through a guided meditation that opens into a drum journey, and nothing is taken by mouth. The pairings are the structure of her course, not a rule handed down from an older tradition. All four plants do appear in the Flower Essence Services range, and each is an ordinary garden or roadside plant with its own botany and lore.

Table D · The four elemental flowers. The element pairings are the course's own structure, not a wider tradition. Quotations are verbatim from the recorded lessons; color and form are from botanical sources.

Earth · Nicotiana

Nicotiana, the flowering tobacco of gardens, comes from South America. In common garden forms the long-tubed flowers open in the late afternoon or evening and are scented at night, and the genus is mainly visited by night-flying moths. In the course it is the flower of Earth, and the lesson opens with its teaching in two sentences:

Air · Trumpet Vine

Trumpet Vine, also called trumpet creeper, is a vigorous woody climber native to the eastern United States, with orange summer flowers favored by the ruby-throated hummingbird. In the course it is the flower of Air, and its teaching is about breath and voice:

Fire · Cayenne

Most people know Cayenne as a spice. Its species was domesticated in Mexico, and its small, mostly white flowers come before the long red pod, the fruit that becomes the spice. In the course it is the flower of Fire, and its teaching is about change:

Water · Fuchsia

Fuchsia is a genus of about 110 species, most of them South American, with pendant flowers that many hummingbirds visit; Charles Plumier named it in 1703 for the botanist Leonhart Fuchs, and the color is named after the flower. In the course it is the flower of Water and of emotion:

This is a contemplative teaching, met in meditation and journey, not a health claim. Each flower, with its lesson, its journey questions and its garden lore, is described in The Four Elemental Flowers.

Meditation, journey and the drum

When a flower is met rather than bottled, the meeting usually happens in one of two inward practices, or in both. Both are done with the body still and the eyes closed or covered, and both regard what happens inside as the place where the work is done, but they ask different things of the attention.

Two practices compared

Meditation rests the attention on one focus, such as the breath or a phrase, or opens it to the present moment, and brings it back when it wanders. An earlier fact sheet from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health named four elements that most forms share: a quiet location, a comfortable posture, a focus of attention and an open attitude. A shamanic journey, as taught in Michael Harner's core shamanism, sets out with an intention and travels inward to a steady, rapid drumbeat to meet what it finds there. Harner (1929 to 2018) set the method out in The Way of the Shaman (1980), and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies teaches it. It is a deliberately cross-cultural method rather than the tradition of any Indigenous people, and it has been criticized on those grounds.

Table I · Meditation vs shamanic journey. Sources: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health; Foundation for Shamanic Studies; Gingras, Pohler and Fitch (2014). The full comparison, with where the two overlap, is in Meditation and Shamanic Journey.

The drum journey, stage by stage

As the Foundation for Shamanic Studies teaches it, a drum journey has a recognizable shape:

1. The intention. A clear purpose and destination, fixed before the drum begins.
2. Posture and setting. Sitting or lying down in a quiet, dim room, with the eyes covered.
3. Going in. A steady, rapid drumbeat begins, or sometimes a rattle.
4. Traveling. The journeyer sets off for the Lower, Upper or Middle World of what core shamanism calls nonordinary reality.
5. Meeting and asking. The journeyer meets a helping spirit, often a power animal, asks the question and listens.
6. The callback. The drum changes to a fast callback rhythm.
7. The return. The journeyer comes back to ordinary reality and opens the eyes.
8. Writing it down. The experience is recorded in a journal.

The tempo is given variously, from about 220 to about 300 beats a minute, with 4 to 7 beats a second reported for contemporary practice; the sources describe the drumming, and this guide states no effect of any tempo. Each stage, with the tempo sources side by side, is explained in What Is a Shamanic Drum Journey?

Guided visualization and pathworking

Between meditation and the drum journey sits a third family of inward practices: guided visualization, in which a voice or a written script leads the imagery step by step. Its best-documented Western form is pathworking, a structured visualization along one of the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, often entered through the Tarot card assigned to that path, spread in the twentieth century by Dion Fortune and Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki. It has nearly the drum journey's shape, but in pathworking the script draws the route; in a drum journey the drum says nothing, and the route appears. The method is set out path by path in the guide to pathworking on the Tree of Life.

Two notes before any inward practice. You can open your eyes at any time. If inward practices are difficult for you, talk with someone you trust first.

Starting a practice

Every tradition on this page begins in the same place: one person and one flower.

Choosing by relationship

Bach wrote that a person's outlook on life should be the guide, and many later makers have followed him in choosing by temperament and mood. The Bach Centre asks for honesty about current feelings and basic personality; Flower Essence Services asks newcomers to start by reading a repertory; Alaskan Essences asks people to sit quietly, write an intention, and notice which flower draws their attention.

Table J · Ways people choose (compact). Each maker's method is attributed to that maker. The full table, with flower cards and dowsing, is in How to Choose a Flower Essence.

Global Spiritual Studies does not publish lists that match a flower to a condition or a mood, for three reasons. The systematic reviews described in section 11 found no effect beyond placebo, so such a list would read as a promise the evidence does not support. A list can also invite someone to reach for a flower in place of a conversation with a doctor or a counselor. And a list runs one way, from a problem to a flower, while a relational practice runs the other way: you go to the flower with open questions about what it is and how it lives. A flower chosen to solve something is being used. A flower met in that way is being known.

Keeping a journal

Writing things down is common ground across the traditions. Flower Essence Services suggests keeping a journal, talking things over regularly with a friend, or taking note of dreams and other inner events. Alaskan Essences asks you to write down the names of the essences that draw your attention and what resonated as you read about each, and notes that the same exercise repeated a month later tends to bring up a different essence. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies advises keeping a journal of each journey. Prompts, and the reasons for writing straight after a practice, are in Flower Essence Journaling.

A first week

What follows is Global Spiritual Studies' own outline for a first week with one flower. It borrows its middle steps from Alaskan Essences and the Flower Essence Society, slows them down, and involves no picking and nothing taken by mouth.

1. Day 1 · Find a flower. Walk somewhere near home and notice what is in bloom. A flower you can visit is one you can come to know.
2. Day 2 · Return. Notice which plant you find yourself coming back to. Write down where it grows.
3. Day 3 · Look. Sit with it for a quarter of an hour. Note its form, its color, how it grows and where.
4. Day 4 · Draw or describe. Draw it, or describe it in words, as exactly as you can.
5. Day 5 · Ask. Ask an open question about what the flower is like, then listen without deciding the answer in advance.
6. Day 6 · Give back. Offer something: thanks spoken aloud, water in a dry spell, a weed pulled from around it.
7. Day 7 · Read back. Read the week's notes from the beginning, and write what you notice now.

If nothing is in flower where you live, the same steps work with a tree on your street, a plant in a pot or a flower in a public garden. A plant that is protected, belongs to someone else or is toxic to handle can still be sat with and studied; it simply should not be gathered or touched.

Working with more than one flower

The makers set different limits on how many essences to combine at one time. The Bach Centre says up to six or seven is usual. Flower Essence Services suggests three to five unless a person is working with a skilled practitioner, and Alaskan Essences suggests no more than four to six. Each is that maker's own guidance for its own bottles. In a relational practice, Global Spiritual Studies suggests coming to know one flower at a time before meeting several.

Reference tables and glossary

This guide carries the cluster's core reference tables in short form. The index below says where each one sits on this page and where its long form lives.

Index of reference tables. Every table on this page is a plain table with a hidden caption, so it can be read aloud by a screen reader and lifted whole by a search assistant.

Glossary of core terms

Table E · Glossary (20 core terms). The full sixty-term glossary, each term in one sentence with the maker who uses it, is a free PDF.

The course: Flower Essence Shamanism

Flower Essence Shamanism is taught by Gina Kearney, a Registered Herbalist (AHG), who came to flower essences in clinical herbalism school. Her account of how the practice began centers on a tree she drove past every day, and a dream:

In the dream she stood before the tree, and its massive trunk grew out into a basket. Standing there, she says:

She later made a similar promise to the flowers, and that, she says, is why the course exists. Showing a photograph of chicory, one of Bach's original twelve, she tells students: “It is the first flower essence that I ever made.”

What you do in the course

The course is six recorded lessons: an introduction to flower essences, then one lesson for each of the four flowers, in the order Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and a closing lesson. Each flower lesson follows the same arc. You sit or lie down, with a notebook and pen nearby, settle through the senses, and welcome the flower in a guided meditation; then the drum begins and the meditation opens into a journey to meet the flower directly. Inside the journey you ask the flower questions, and in the Earth and Air journeys you ask whether there is anything you can do for her; then you are guided back “into the body, into the room, into the life.” In the Earth and Air lessons she then asks you to write down everything you experienced. No bottle is needed, and nothing is taken by mouth. She describes the whole as one practice:

Nothing special is required to begin. In her words: “No special teachings. No special skills. We are all born knowing how to do this.” Beyond the four recorded flowers, a fifth flower, Buttercup, is part of the course's live sessions. Buttercup is toxic to handle: the fresh plant can blister skin.

Online course · Gina Kearney, RH (AHG) Flower Essence Shamanism · Meeting the Four Elemental Flowers Six recorded lessons. An introduction to flower essences, then one guided meditation and drum journey for each of four flowers: Nicotiana for Earth, Trumpet Vine for Air, Cayenne for Fire and Fuchsia for Water. No bottle is needed. Explore the practice → What's included

• Six recorded lessonsover 2½ hours of teaching and practice
• Four guided journeysa meditation and drum journey for each flower
• PDF handouts and flower cardssix lesson handouts, four printable cards
• Two live sessions with Ginaa live Q&A and a fifth-flower practice, both recorded
• Final quiz and certificatea certificate of completion in your name
• Captions on every lessonEnglish now, translations coming soon

Her training and background are set out on her instructor page. For those who want to keep practicing after the course, her own work includes The Gathering.

What the research says

The clinical trials of flower remedies have been examined in several systematic reviews. A 2009 review by Thaler and colleagues in BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine found no evidence of benefit compared with a placebo in the controlled trials it analyzed, and judged most of the available evidence to be at high risk of bias. Two reviews by Edzard Ernst, in 2002 and 2010, reached the same conclusion: the most reliable trials show no difference from placebo. Global Spiritual Studies teaches flower essences as a spiritual and contemplative practice, a living tradition of attention to the natural world, and makes no health claims for them. The same reviews are summarized in What Is a Flower Essence?

Sources & Tradition42 references

• Gina Kearney is quoted verbatim from the recorded lessons of Flower Essence Shamanism (Global Spiritual Studies, 2026), Lessons 1 to 5.
• American Herbalists Guild, Registered Herbalist listing, RH (AHG) · americanherbalistsguild.com
• Edward Bach, The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies (1936), with the editors' introduction and notes to the 1941 edition · Dr Edward Bach Centre (PDF) · Bach Centre electronic edition · Dr Edward Bach Centre (PDF)
• The Dr Edward Bach Centre, on the sun and boiling methods and the mother tincture · bachcentre.com · History · bachcentre.com · Selecting remedies · bachcentre.com · Help with using the remedies (combinations, alcohol-free) · Bach Centre FAQ
• Flower Essence Services (FES), “What are flower essences?”, other FAQs and how to use · fesflowers.com · FES FAQs · How to use · About Us · fesflowers.com · site footer (statements not evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration) · fesflowers.com · Professional Kit (103 essences) · fesflowers.com
• Flower Essence Services, “History of the Bach Flower Essences” (Nelsons 1991 and 1993, the 1979 trademark, Healing Herbs 1988) · fesflowers.com
• Flower Essence Society, “About the Society” · flowersociety.org · Patricia Kaminski and Richard Katz, “The Twelve Windows of Plant Perception” · flowersociety.org
• US National Library of Medicine, DailyMed, labels by Nelson Bach USA Limited (marketing category “unapproved homeopathic”, human OTC drug label) · dailymed.nlm.nih.gov · Bach Original Flower Remedies retail label, Rescue (grape alcohol approx 27% v/v), as listed by UK retailers (checked October 2026) · Bach Flower Remedies Ltd v Healing Herbs Ltd, Court of Appeal, 21 October 1999
• Healing Herbs, home page (“traditionally made with organic cognac”) · healingherbs.co.uk · “Making Our Essences” · healingherbs.co.uk · tribute, “Julian Barnard 1947 to 2026” · Essence Mentoring
• Alaskan Essences, About Us, FAQ and how to select essences · alaskanessences.com · FAQ · How to select
• Findhorn Flower Essences · findhornessences.com · “How Findhorn Flower Essences began” · founding account · SourceWatch, “Marion Leigh” · sourcewatch.org
• Spirit-in-Nature Essences, About · spirit-in-nature.com · Ananda, “Spirit-in-Nature Essences: Yogananda's Insights” · ananda.org
• Pacific Essences, “Our Story” · pacificessences.com · Redwing Books, Pacific Essences description · redwingbooks.com
• Desert Alchemy, About and FAQ · desert-alchemy.com · FAQ
• Perelandra, “Back to Basics: The Perelandra Essences” · perelandra-ltd.com
• Green Hope Farm, About and About the Essences · greenhopeessences.com · about the essences
• Delta Gardens, home page and “Our Story” (mid-1980s) · deltagardens.com · Our Story · David Dalton, Stars of the Meadow, publisher's author note (Delta Gardens, New Hampshire) · Floris Books
• Bailey Essences, home page (fifty years; transfer to Yorkshire Flower Essences Ltd, March 2016) · baileyessences.com · Ilkley BID, “Yorkshire Flower Essences” (Dr Arthur Bailey, 1967) · ilkleybid.co.uk
• Australian Bush Flower Essences, About (1986) · ausflowers.com.au · Ian White interview summary (1987), Network to Heal Summit, episode 252 · podbean.com · Ian White profile · Pittwater Online News
• Living Essences of Australia, About us · livingessences.com.au · range count · Macrolibrarsi
• South African Flower Essences, home page (on the market since 1994; 151 single essences) · safloweressences.co.za · About · safloweressences.co.za
• Himalayan Flower Enhancers, “The Flowers' Story” · himalaya.com.au
• Bloesem Remedies Nederland · bloesemremedies.com · “Prepareren” · preparation
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• Gurudas, Flower Essences and Vibrational Healing (Albuquerque: Brotherhood of Life, 1983)
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Frequently asked questions

One flower, some water, and the time to sit with both.