Flower essences

What it is

Preparations made by steeping flowers in water, preserved in brandy and taken in drops, intended to act on emotional and mental states rather than on physical symptoms.

The best-known system is Edward Bach's, comprising 38 remedies, each matched to a negative emotional state — mimulus for known fears, aspen for vague dread, impatiens for impatience, gorse for hopelessness, white chestnut for circling thoughts. The commercial preparation marketed as Rescue Remedy is a combination of five.

Later systems — Australian Bush Flower Essences among them — use the same method with local flora.

Flower essences are frequently confused with two other things they are not. They are not essential oils, which are concentrated volatile plant extracts with real chemical content and real hazards. And they are not quite homeopathy, though they share extreme dilution: there is no succussion, no potency scale, and no like-cures-like principle.

Where it came from

Edward Bach was an English physician and bacteriologist with a substantial conventional career before he abandoned it. From 1930 until his death in 1936 he worked in Oxfordshire developing the remedies, and his method is described in his own article.

The short version matters here: he said openly that he identified the remedies intuitively, by holding his hand over a flower or placing a petal on his tongue and observing the emotional state it produced in him. He did not claim to have tested them, and he was not concealing a method — he regarded intuition as the appropriate route to this kind of knowledge, and said so.

How it is done

Flowers are prepared either by the sun method — floating blooms in a bowl of spring water in sunlight for some hours — or the boiling method for woodier material. The resulting liquid is preserved with brandy to make a mother tincture, which is then diluted heavily, and diluted again to make the stock bottles sold to the public. A few drops are taken under the tongue or in water, several times a day, chosen to match the person's emotional state rather than their diagnosis.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the final product contains essentially no plant material. This is not a contested point and it is not hostile: given the dilutions involved, the bottle contains water, brandy, and whatever the water was in contact with. Any effect cannot be pharmacological, and practitioners generally do not claim that it is — the proposed mechanism is that the water carries the flower's energetic imprint.

We can say the trials are negative. Systematic reviews, including one by Edzard Ernst, consistently find that the better-controlled clinical trials show no difference between flower remedies and placebo. This is not a case of insufficient research; it has been looked at.

We can say the direct harm is low, which distinguishes this from much of traditional herbalism. There is no active constituent to poison anyone or interact with a prescription. The two real cautions are the brandy content — relevant for children, for people in recovery from alcohol dependence, and in quantity — and the standard one that applies across this site: the risk is not the drops, it is what the drops replace or delay.

We can say the placebo response here is worth taking seriously rather than sneering at. Choosing a remedy requires sitting down and identifying what you are actually feeling, from a list of thirty-eight carefully distinguished emotional states — the difference between known fear and vague dread, between exhaustion and resignation. That is a genuinely useful exercise. It is also free, and does not require the bottle.

We cannot say people do not feel better. Many report that they do. What can be said is that the evidence points at the choosing rather than the drinking.

Further reading

• Edward Bach, The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies (1936) — very short, and clearer about its own basis than most modern accounts of it.
• Ernst, "Bach flower remedies: a systematic review of randomised clinical trials" (2010).