A close up picture of a Chicory flower in nature

The Power of Flowers - Why Flowers are Used in Flower Essences?

Why flowers are the heart of flower essence therapy, and why Dr Edward Bach believed they held unique qualities

Humanity has used plants medicinally for thousands of years, but flower essences are a little different to other natural remedies. Of all the parts of a plant, why are flowers used to make flower essences? Why not the leaves, roots or bark? What is it about a flower that makes it so special?

The answer lies in the remarkable properties that flowers have and in how a flower essence works. For Dr Edward Bach, flowers represented nature at its purest and most harmonious, making them the perfect tools for emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

The Power of Flowers

While a plants roots act as its anchor, its leaves nourish and its stems support, the flower is where the plant reveals its unique character to the world. It is a point of beauty, attraction, reproduction and fulfilment. If the leaves and roots are concerned with survival, the flower is concerned with expression, relationship, creativity and the continuation of life.

You might say that from both a botanical and symbolic perspective, it is the culmination of the plant's journey.

A flower is the most vibrant, alive and energetic expression of plant or trees life force energy, and it also carries its highest vibrational frequency. You can feel this, and its resonance with your own energy system, when you are in the presence of a beautiful rose or in a field of wild flowers.

This is the flower's subtle energy signature, consciousness or plant spirit, rather than something that can be explained through its physical or chemical properties.

When you make a flower essence, it is this energy that is held in a liquid form.

Why Did Dr Edward Bach Choose Flowers?

Dr Bach spoke of his desire to work with the ‘remedies of the meadow and of Nature’

Flower essences as we know them today were first created by Dr Edward Bach in the 1930’s. Often known as the father of modern flower essences, Dr. Bach was driven by a deep desire to find the truth about human illness & disease and to create a set of natural remedies to help.

Through his years of research, Dr. Bach came to believe that health comes from living in harmony with our true self, and illness begins when you lose that inner harmony.

“Health depends on being in harmony with our souls.” Edward Bach

When our everyday personality becomes disconnected from that deeper self through fear, worry, anger, guilt, resentment, or other negative emotional states, inner conflict arises. Over time, he believed this inner conflict, or disconnection from our soul, could eventually contribute to physical illness.

The Healing Herbs of Nature

Flowers potentising in a bowl of water - making a Chicory flower essence

Bach was deeply drawn to the healing potential of nature and specifically the wild flowers that he found growing in the English and Welsh countryside. He was very sensitive and intuitive and came to understand that each flower held a different subtle energy, and would help us with particular emotions, thoughts, feelings and beliefs. This he felt was because a flower carries a particularly high vibrational frequency and would have a profound effect on our wellbeing.

And so he set out to find the right flowers which had “the power to elevate our vibrations, and thus draw down spiritual power, which cleanses mind and body, and heals.”

The idea of the 38 Bach Flower Remedies was that they would gently help people rediscover positive states rather than suppressing symptoms. Flowers reflected this philosophy perfectly as they are nature’s highest expression of itself, they are delicate rather than forceful, and yet capable of profound transformation. And of course, they are simple, easy and safe to use and can be made by anyone who so wishes.

“The whole principle of Healing by this method is so simple as can be understood by almost everyone, and even the very Herbs themselves can be gathered and prepared by any who take delight in such.” Edward Bach - Masonic Lecture

Why we Respond to Nature & Flower Essences

Each flower carries its own unique, high vibrational frequency, an energetic signature that speaks quietly to you. You can see this expressed in its doctrine of signature, its way of being, its ‘personality’.

Even if you’re not consciously aware of it, you sense and respond to these subtle energies because you’re naturally attuned to the energies and rhythms of the natural world. No matter how separate you may feel from nature, you are in essence a part of nature itself and are affected by her subtle energies.

Picture of a person using a flower essence

When you use a flower essence, it is these subtle energies of nature that are helping to create inner harmony, balance, transformation and change in your life. They do this because they carry a higher vibrational frequency, one that helps you to release lower vibrational frequencies, such as fear, anger, and guilt etc.

Each Flower Helps in a Different Way

Each flower has a very particular and powerful way of helping you to release what is not in balance within you. So, for example, the subtle energy of the Mimulus flower helps with known fears and worries, White Chestnut helps to calm an over-active mind, the Larch flowers help with confidence, Pine with guilt and Gentian with doubt. Beyond the Bach Remedies there are many other flowers that help too, for example Loosestrife helps with grounding, Borage helps with grief, sorrow, sadness and Yarrow helps with boundaries and protection.

“They cure, not by attacking disease, but by flooding our bodies with the beautiful vibrations of our Higher Nature, in the presence of which disease melts as snow in the sunshine” Edward Bach - Ye Suffer From Yourselves

How a Flower Essence Works

Taking a flower essence is rather like a tuning fork striking a particular note. When one perfectly tuned note is sounded, nearby tuning forks naturally begin to resonate with the same vibration. In much the same way, flower essences gently invite your own emotional and energetic patterns back into harmony with the positive qualities embodied by the flower.

Everything in nature carries a subtle energy or vibrational frequency, we are surrounded by energy in motion. We ourselves are made up of vibrating energies, and so we respond very quickly to the positive, higher vibrational frequencies contained within flowers, and also in a slightly different way, to the ones held by gems, crystals and minerals.

As the subtle energy or consciousness that’s held within the essence flows into your energetic system it retunes and realigns any areas of imbalance so that you can remember consciously that you are a spiritual being having a human experience.

Flowers & Dr Bach's Vision

Ultimately Dr Bach's vision was that flowers could gently remind us of our own true nature. That flower essences encourage us to reconnect with qualities such as courage, joy, peace, confidence and love that already exist within us. And as we find that inner balance, harmony and connection it would ‘bring us nearer to the Divinity within’, allowing that deeper part of ourselves to guide us through our inner journeys and facilitate our inner healing processes.