When we began to share our Flower Essences with people and animals back in the late eighties, I laughed out loud when someone suggested I needed a computer.

It’s probably a classic tale of many in my generation!

“Really?” I chortled, “You think ANY of us will need those things?”

I was determined all my correspondence for the rest of my life would be with a fountain pen and green ink. I probably hoped my heartfelt missives would be delivered by pony express too.

The world went on about its business regardless of my opinions, and so by the early nineties when our mail order business took off, we got our first computer. A forward thinker on staff talked me into a funny little Macintosh computer which all the men in the family adored. Too bad I didn’t think to invest in the company at the same time.

The same forward thinker behind the computer purchase set up our mailing list in a quirky way, but I didn’t really care that it was quirky because, let’s face it, computers were a fad and this wasn’t going to be important. I was just pacifying those computer nuts.

And so we have lived with this quirky mailing list entry system for almost twenty five years. My husband Jim took computer programming in college and wrote all the programs for invoicing your orders. He worked around the quirky mailing list and created an invoicing system adaptable to the growth of our Flower Essence inventory as well as the business. His systems still work beautifully. However the next generation tells me that it’s not quite enough anymore.

Oh, but I am getting ahead of myself!

Let us return to those early years when we suddenly had several of these boxy Macintoshes. We might have been goddesses in the gardens but inside, our misunderstandings about these strange computer beasts meant that any of us “office ladies” could derail all the computers in a matter of minutes. One staffer named Susan could place her hands over the keyboard and almost immediately the machine would start firing off endless loops of strange numbers and symbols. What on earth had she done? What on earth were any of us doing? We circled the computers each morning with dread. We knew with piercing certainty that each day would bring flower love AND computer drama.

If my son Ben had a dollar for every time he had to help out us “office ladies” with a computer problem, he would be preparing to retire on a mountain of cash.

Over time we learned that the first thing Ben was going to say when we greeted him as he got off the school bus was, “Did you try turning off the computer and restarting it?” Remembering this pearl of wisdom meant that by the time Ben went to college there were only one or two freaked out phone calls or emails from us a day.

Yes, we got talked into emails too. And a fax machine and a website and three more computers in a row so we could keep getting your orders to you.

You’ll love the story of the first website. With no idea how to proceed, I hired a website person who was a friend of a friend of a friend. She lived in the Pacific Northwest, about as far from here as possible, so we had an endless series of miscommunication over email and phone. The first website was very odd with a lot of floaty imagery. I encouraged the web designer to switch out these images with photos that were more representational of gardens, Flowers and dirt versus misty globs of amorphous lights. Despite my suggestions there remained an overall ungrounded feeling of the site. It was a relief when Ben took over the site a few years later when the original web designer said she was leaving the planet on a spaceship.

Throughout his twenties and into his thirties, Ben wrote code and rebuilt our website in a series of upgrades, the latest of which was launched a little over a year ago. Over time I have gotten slightly less resistant to progress and slightly more open to change though clearly not fast enough for technology or my wise children who now work here too.

These four brave souls (aka the lobbyists for the Angels) continue to nudge me to let go and embrace where the world is taking us. They gamely sort out the enormous amount of data I’ve generated about Flower Essences and creatively share it with you in formats other than green ink and fountain pens. And I thank them!

This brings us to our news! We will launch a new online ordering system in a matter of days. The system was built by Ben who studied Ruby on Rails and other web platforms in Barcelona and now brings this expertise back to us. The online ordering system is elegant, it’s efficient and it means you can go to the website and order anything on the main line up, pay for it on pay pal right then and we will ship it off to you. Transaction complete.

For those dear ones who like our trust system, chatting on email with us before ordering or sending your order written out in green ink with a fountain pen- No worries! I carry the banner for all of us, and YOU CAN STILL ORDER JUST LIKE YOU WANT TO! If you are ordering additional Flower Essences, you will have to contact us by phone or email to order these as the website won’t have a shopping cart for these. You will also have to contact us for expedited and UPS orders as well.

With this new system also comes a small price increase for our Flower Essences from $7.35 to $7.85 for a ½ ounce individual Flower Essence and from $9.00 to $9.50 for a ½ ounce combination Flower Essence and from $25 to $27 for a 2 ounce individual Flower Essence and from $30 to $32 for a 2 ounce combination Flower Essence. We have not raised our prices in 20 years, but the reality is all our supplies like bottles and bottle tops have increased in price in this time, and we must make this change.

Within a week or two we will add our 40,000th Green Hope Farm friend to our quirky mailing list! So many of you have been with us since the beginning. We know and love you! We thank you for all our years together. Us “office ladies” remark daily what wonderful GHF friends we have. We love sharing in your lives. We love knowing about your dogs, cats, horses and elephants! We are grateful for the chance to stand at your side through your ups and downs, and we thank you for being there through ours.

I will post on FB when the online system and all the changes go live. We aim for February 20th. Even after we launch, we will STILL be here reading your precious letters, decorating the office with your cards, visiting on email and doing everything in the spirit of green ink and a fountain pens. I promise!

Emily and Elizabeth on a Flower Essence trip to Bermuda back in the green ink days

These people are now running the website. They ARE 20 years older than they are in this photo, but you can tell from young William’s expression that even then he knows its going to be a problem dealing with his luddite mom.

PS THANKS BEN!

The electrical energies on the planet continue to rise, requiring our individual circuit boards to align with this higher vibrational rate. Flowers from all over the Earth are clamoring to assist us in keeping up with the necessary electrical shifts.

Flower Essences are one way Flowers help us even when we cannot visit with the Flowers in person. Here at the farm we are welcoming in Flower Essences from all over the world as fast as we can build shelving!

Sometimes faster!

Most recently we welcomed the arrival of forty five astounding new Flower Essence friends from Taiwan, brought to us by GHF beloved Sarah Porter.

How could it be that we had hardly shelved the new Flower Essences from December’s trip to St John and these new Flower Essences from Taiwan were here, asking to be known and shared?

When I asked the Angels and Elementals about the why of all these new arrivals, they told me that so much is happening electrically on the planet right now that humanity needs to have the assistance of all these grounded, wise Flowers ASAP.

This planetary vibrational shift calls us from an experience of self as limited to our own physical being to an expanded experience of self that encompasses the entire globe and beyond.

This means Flower Essences from around the world are appropriate tools for shifting from this limited definition of self to an unlimited one.

As we experience the wisdom of Flowers from all over Earth, we experience a planetary wisdom of wholeness. We own unrecognized parts of ourselves and move towards a felt experience of inclusive planetary oneness.

As far as these lovely new Taiwan Essences, they come from a country whose people have gone through tumultuous changes in identity, a people in flux about who they are and how they fit into the world. They are supported in this search by their Flowers. In the wild mountains of Taiwan, the Flowers exist in a state of certainty about who they are and how they are part of the whole. They know this balance of being unique and knowing wholeness. And now these Flowers come to help all of us.

In addition, for those of us in the western and northern hemispheres of our planet, it’s helpful to experience the wisdom of Taiwanese Flowers as they are from the southern and eastern hemispheres. They offer us a planetary wisdom far from that of our own backyard. This helps move us towards an embodied experience that we are not separate from anything on Earth; we are all one.

I know some consider me a naïve Pollyanna/Mollyanna when I stand in my conviction that these planetary energy changes are taking us towards a golden age, but I do not waiver in this belief. For each of us this planetary shift is an inner shift from limited self to boundless self-identity. When we put these individual shifts together into a collective shift, it will naturally transform all external behavior from selfish to selfless and will bring healing and wholeness to Earth and all humanity.

The leg work of getting these new Flower Essences ready for you is underway. While Sarah was in Taiwan, I poured through all my books about tropical flora to identify the new St John beloveds. In particular, I leaned on the New York Botanical Garden’s Flora of St John.

After finding the latin names for the new Flower Essences from St John, I began to listen for their own descriptions of themselves and their gifts. Their communications AND THEIR ACTUAL VIBRATIONS are much more important than latin names in terms of helping us. However the latin names keep everything straight so I can share with you which Flower is offering what expertise.

Now I am on the adventure of a lifetime as I get to know this astounding group of Flower Essences Sarah has brought us from Taiwan. I have been on a hunt for their latin names with some of my very peculiar books.

More importantly I have begun to listen and learn from each Flower the specifics of their gifts of wisdom and embodied divinity.

Taiwan was not a place I thought about much before Sarah’s trip. Our blue bottles come from Taiwan so I thought a little bit about this far off place but not really. In my mind’s eye I incorrectly imagined a mostly industrial island covered in concrete and good eats.

When Sarah left for her month in Taiwan, I asked her to see what Flowers were calling to come to Green Hope Farm but I didn’t imagine the response she would receive.

Life is rich with the most unexpected gifts and the Flowers of Taiwan are up there for me as particular blessings. What I am learning is that Taiwan is a special place for Flowers.

These Essences from Taiwan have opened an enormous doorway here at the farm. I am captivated by what I am learning about the wild mountains of Taiwan, its Flowers and a people deeply enamored of their Flowers. I seek a Flower vocabulary I do not have as many of the Flowers that called to Sarah do not resemble anything I have ever seen.

With every Flower book I have piled around me, I search for names. Sometimes when I seek to identify a plant, I recognize the family of plants or a Flower bearing a resemblance to a Flower I already know and love. This whisper of recognition helped me with about half of the Flower Essences from Taiwan. Then I found myself deep in unknown territory.

How I wish I could read Chinese! How very glad I am that Sarah can!

There is a grace in all this that takes us well beyond my enormous pile of strange and wonderful books for plant identification. If I fail to identify these Flowers, all is not lost. Flowers offer their gifts to us via their Flower Essences NO WORDS NECESSARY!

Whether I can slot these Flowers into humanity’s latin name data base or not, these Flowers want to share themselves fully! Generous Nature has long grounded, healed and restored us. Now the charge among the Flowers is to help us evolve as swiftly as possible.

As humanity moves towards conscious oneness, the Flowers show us the way. Unique in their strength and beauty, they operate from a place of collective consciousness.

When I first started to make Flower Essences almost thirty years ago, I was never quite sure if the Flowers knew what I was talking about when I asked their permission to co-create a Flower Essence together. Now when I meet a Flower we are mid conversation. Energies of love sweep into my heart from the Flowers. They are so present to help and support us all. All we need to do is accept and welcome their love as they show us the way to understand ourselves as one with our whole planet.

Hopefully later this week I will begin to post info on all these new beloveds! In the meantime I hope you enjoyed these silly photos from the books I look to for latin names!