The History of Flower Essences: A Timeline from 1928 to Today

Flower essences were invented by the English physician Edward Bach between 1928 and 1936. His first remedies date from 1928 to 1930, and the first three were homeopathic preparations. He found the sun method in 1930 and the boiling method in 1935, and his 38 were complete by 1936. New makers followed from 1977 onward.

This page is the Global Spiritual Studies reference on the history of flower essences. It is drawn from primary sources (Bach's own text and the Bach Centre's notes to it, the histories published by the Bach Centre and Flower Essence Services, court records and the makers' own accounts of their founding), 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.

Before Bach

A flower essence, as the term is used today, is water that has held flowers in sunlight or been boiled with them, then preserved with brandy or another alcohol and diluted. In that sense the preparation has a clear starting point: Edward Bach made the first ones between 1928 and 1930. Older practices that sound similar are harder to pin down, and the record for them is thin.

Flower dew in popular histories

Many modern accounts open with flower dew. A teaching page from Endeavour College of Natural Health, for example, says that the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen laid muslin over flowers at night and wrung out the dew in the morning, and that flowers were used in ancient Egypt in ways recorded on papyrus. Other popular histories add that the Swiss physician Paracelsus gathered dew from flowers in the sixteenth century. None of these accounts cites a passage in Hildegard's or Paracelsus's own writings, and none has been traced to one for this page. They are best read as a tradition about the past that flower essence writers tell, not as documented practice.

Paracelsus and the doctrine of signatures

What is documented is an idea. Paracelsus (1493 to 1541) taught that nature marks each plant with a sign of its use, so that the shape, color or habit of a plant could be read like a label. The German mystic Jakob Böhme gave the idea its usual name in Signatura Rerum (The Signature of All Things), dated 1621 in most accounts and 1622 in some, and the English herbalist William Coles carried it into English herbals with The Art of Simpling (1656). The doctrine of signatures was a theory of old plant medicine and is now of historical interest only. It matters to this story because its vocabulary outlived it: some later flower essence makers still speak of a plant's “signature” when they describe how its form and growth suggest its character.

Homeopathy

The other root is homeopathy, developed in Germany by Samuel Hahnemann (1755 to 1843), who first published its principle in 1796. Homeopathy prepares substances by repeated dilution and shaking. Bach was a homeopath before he was a maker of flower remedies, and the first three plants of his system were first prepared in the homeopathic way. Flower essences and homeopathic remedies share some words, such as “mother tincture”, but they rest on different principles and are made from different materials; the comparison is set out in flower essences vs essential oils, tinctures and homeopathy.

Edward Bach, 1928 to 1936

Edward Bach was born at Moseley, near Birmingham, on 24 September 1886. He qualified as a doctor in 1912, worked at University College Hospital and kept rooms in Harley Street, and from 1919 worked at the London Homoeopathic Hospital, where he developed the seven “Bach nosodes” with John Paterson and Charles Wheeler. The Bach Centre's editors date that homeopathic work to 1919 to 1928 and note that the seven headings of his later flower system were based on the character he gave each nosode. His full life is told in Edward Bach and the Bach flower remedies; what follows is the part that founded the tradition.

The first remedies, 1928 to 1930

The first three plants of Bach's system were Impatiens, Mimulus and Clematis, and the sources give three years for them. 1928 is the year most often repeated in popular histories. 1929 is the year a local account gives for Bach's finding of Mimulus on the bank of the River Grwyney near Crickhowell in Wales, in a campsite's site description; no other source for it has been found. February 1930 is the first date in print, when Bach described the three, with two other plant remedies, in the journal Homoeopathic World. The Bach Centre's editors add the decisive detail: those first three were homeopathic preparations, made by trituration and succussion. Flower remedies as they are made today began later in 1930, when Bach found the sun method.

The date story, then, runs like this: the first remedies date from 1928 to 1930, and the first three were homeopathic preparations; the sun method came in 1930, the boiling method in 1935, and the 38 were complete by 1936. Flower Essence Services, the California maker, tells the short version, that flower essences were first prepared in England in the 1930s.

The sun method, 1930

In 1930 Bach gave up his London practice and went into the countryside with his assistant Nora Weeks. In the final text of his book he describes the sun method in a few lines: a thin glass bowl almost filled with pure water, ideally from a nearby spring; the blooms floated on the surface at once; three or four hours in bright sunshine, or less if the flowers begin to fade; the blooms lifted out and the water bottled with an equal measure of brandy. Twenty of the 38 remedies were made this way, including all of the first twelve. Every later maker of flower essences has worked from this method or a variant of it; the details, maker by maker, are in how to make a flower essence.

The Twelve Healers, the Helpers and the 38

Bach had twelve remedies by 1932. In the spring of 1933 he printed a pamphlet, The Twelve Healers, and in the autumn of 1933 the publisher C.W. Daniel issued The Twelve Healers and Four Helpers. The Twelve Healers and Seven Helpers, with nineteen remedies, followed in July 1934. Popular summaries often conflate the two editions and date the Seven Helpers to 1933; the Bach Centre's editors keep them apart. In April 1934 Bach settled at Mount Vernon, a house in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire.

By the autumn of 1935 he had found nineteen further remedies and a second method of making them, boiling the flowering parts for half an hour in clean water. Eighteen of the 38 were made by boiling. Bach declared the system complete. On his fiftieth birthday, 24 September 1936, The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies was published, with the healers and helpers dropped and all 38 placed under seven headings. On 30 October he dictated a longer introduction to Nora Weeks, and on 27 November 1936 he died in his sleep at Wallingford, aged fifty. The introduction was added in the 1941 edition, which the Bach Centre regards as the definitive text.

After Bach: the Bach Centre and the 38

Nora Weeks and Victor Bullen, a builder Bach had met in Cromer, kept his work going at Mount Vernon, which became the Dr Edward Bach Centre. The 1941 edition of The Twelve Healers already named two London chemists who stocked the remedies; one was Nelson & Co. of Duke Street. Bullen died in 1975 and Weeks in January 1978. Nickie Murray and John Ramsell, sister and brother, carried the Centre on; Flower Essence Services dates Murray's arrival to 1962 and the Bach Centre to the late 1960s, so the exact year is uncertain. Judy Ramsell Howard joined in 1985 and Stefan Ball in 1996.

Two changes at the end of the 1970s shaped how the Bach remedies reached the public. Toward the end of the decade Nora Weeks withdrew the book on remedy-making she had written with Victor Bullen, and most of the method section was cut from The Twelve Healers at the same time; the Bach Centre republished the Weeks and Bullen book in 1998. And, according to Flower Essence Services, Bach's name was registered as a trademark in 1979.

The trademark became the subject of a long dispute. The herbalist Julian Barnard, who had learned to prepare the remedies from Nickie Murray, founded Healing Herbs in 1988 to make all 38 by Bach's own methods in Herefordshire. His company challenged the registrations, and in Bach Flower Remedies Ltd v Healing Herbs Ltd the High Court (Neuberger J, 1998) held the word marks generic and invalid, and the Court of Appeal dismissed Bach Flower Remedies Ltd's appeal on 21 October 1999. In the meantime the remedy business had changed hands: by Flower Essence Services' account, Nelsons took over bottling and distribution in 1991 and acquired the business in 1993, while the Bach Centre stayed separate and today teaches and publishes Bach's texts. Barnard died on 13 September 2026.

The second wave, 1977 onward

For forty years after Bach's death, flower remedies meant his 38. From the late 1970s, makers in other countries began to apply his sun method to their own flowers, and the tradition became international. Their founding dates come mostly from the makers themselves, and several are given differently by different accounts; each is shown below as its source states it.

• Spirit-in-Nature Essences, 1977. Lila Devi began the line, first sold as Master's Flower Essences, in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. It describes itself as the oldest flower essence line outside the United Kingdom.
• Living Essences of Australia, 1977. By the company's account, Vasudeva Barnao began researching and making Australian flower essences in 1977; he moved to Perth in 1980, where he and Kadambii Barnao built the line together. Two lines, then, date their start to the same year.
• Flower Essence Society, 1979. Richard Katz founded the Society in California; Patricia Kaminski has been co-director since 1980. It is based in Nevada City and publishes the Flower Essence Repertory.
• Alaskan Essences, 1983 and 1984. Steve Johnson made his first essences at Lake Minchumina in 1983 and founded the Alaskan Flower Essence Project in January 1984. The company says it makes all of its essences by sun infusion.
• Pacific Essences, 1983. Sabina Pettitt and a partner the company's story names as Michael made a first west coast flower essence, from Blue Camas, in 1981 and formally founded Pacific Essences on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 1983. In 1985 it made its first sea essences, from plants and creatures of the Pacific Ocean, which it describes as the first of their kind.
• Delta Gardens, mid-1980s. David Dalton founded Delta Gardens, a center for flower essence research and education, 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.
• Perelandra, 1984 to 1994. Machaelle Small Wright, cofounder of the Perelandra nature research center in Virginia, developed the Perelandra Essences in its garden between 1984 and 1994, by the maker's account, and published Flower Essences about them in 1988.
• Australian Bush Flower Essences, 1986 or 1987. Ian White, who grew up at Terrey Hills near Sydney beside a grandmother who studied Australian plants, founded the line in 1986 by the company's own history; an interview account gives 1987.
• Himalayan Flower Enhancers, 1990. By the maker's own account, Tanmaya was living for about four months in 1990 in a remote valley of the Indian Himalayas when the first of these essences came to him.
• Findhorn Flower Essences, 1993 or 2000. Marion Leigh began making essences at the Findhorn community in Scotland. The line began in 1993 by the most detailed founding account, or in 2000 by SourceWatch, which dates Leigh's return to the Findhorn Community to 1992.
• South African Flower Essences, 1994. Jannet Unite-Penny makes this line on the slopes of Table Mountain, near Cape Town; the maker says it has been on the market since 1994.
• Bailey Essences. The Bailey family of Ilkley, Yorkshire, describe fifty years of work with flower essences, 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 and are still made in Ilkley.

Two things stand out in this list. The first is how many of the lines were founded or are led by women: Lila Devi, Kadambii Barnao, Patricia Kaminski, Sabina Pettitt, Machaelle Small Wright, Marion Leigh and Jannet Unite-Penny, with Nora Weeks before them. The second is that the sun method traveled with all of them, while the choice of flowers became local: Alaskan wildflowers, Australian bush plants, fynbos at the Cape. Each line, with its founder, base, method and size, is described in the directory of flower essence makers.

Flower essences today

Nearly a century after Bach's first remedies, the tradition runs on two tracks. The Bach Centre keeps the system closed at 38. It works only with the original remedies and says that before he died Bach warned that attempts would be made to change his work and make it more complicated. Most other makers keep adding flowers from their own regions.

How the bottles are sold 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”. Flower Essence Services, the Flower Essence Society's sister company, states on its site that its statements have not been evaluated by the US Food and Drug Administration. In the United Kingdom, the Court of Appeal ruled against Bach Flower Remedies Ltd in 1999, and Flower Essence Services reports that “Bach Flower Remedies” is no longer a UK trademark; Healing Herbs, Nelsons and other makers sell the 38 side by side. Neither a drug listing nor a trademark ruling is an evaluation of what the essences do.

Bach wrote of his remedies with great confidence. Systematic reviews of the clinical trials, by Thaler and colleagues in 2009 and by Edzard Ernst in 2010, reported no evidence of benefit compared with placebo in the trials they examined. Global Spiritual Studies records that history as history and teaches flower essences as a contemplative practice, one in which a person sits with a flower rather than a bottle.

Flower essence timeline

The table sets the whole sequence in one place, from the doctrine of signatures to the present. Where the sources disagree, the row says so.

Bach rows follow the editors' introduction to the Bach Centre's 1941 edition of The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies and the Bach Centre's history pages. Maker rows follow each maker's own account unless another source is named; single-source dates are marked. Full references are listed at the end of this page.

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Frequently asked questions

A bowl of spring water in 1930, and every maker since.