How do you decide what Flowers to make into Flower Essences?
Most of the decision making is out of my hands. I talk to the Angels and Elementals everywhere I go and most certainly in the gardens here, and they point me in various directions. Sometimes they get my attention by having a Flower fill my heart with overwhelming love. That’s a nice nudge! In any case, I know from long experience that the Angels and Elementals have perspective about what Flower Essences are needed, so I follow their lead. Their guidance can be succinct, but there’s still a fair amount of mystery involved.
Often my partners don’t tell me too much about the whys of growing a new Flower for an Essence or the whys of a new garden design. From three decades working this way, I know one of the reasons for this is that I have things to learn as the gardens unfold, and it wouldn’t help my process if they said, “Okay this garden is going to harvest a Flower Essence about letting go and you are going to have a season of doing nothing but let go.” This kind of heads up might take the wind of out my sails for one thing!
For another, it really becomes shared wisdom through this process. The Angels and Elementals already know the vibrational strengths of each of the Flowers, but I get to learn this as I grow the Flowers and experience the gifts each Flower bring to the gardens and my life. I may not go to school each September anymore, but I feel the growing season is my classroom with a syllabus given in January, projects begun in February, great intensity of learning in the summer then a harvest of both Flower Essences and what I have learned in September and October.
When the Angels and Elementals ask you to make a certain Flower Essence, is this always a straightforward process?
Not at all. Sometimes it is hard to find the Flower. Sometimes it takes awhile to grow the Flower for the Essence. Some Flower Essences come completely out of the blue.
This year saw a couple of different examples of this. Some Flowers I had been trying to make into Essences for a number of years were finally landed. With Artichoke Flower Essence, I had seen beautiful Artichoke Flowers in Ireland on a number of visits. It was my first nudge to grow the Flower.
Artichoke Flowers are the edible chokes that have gone by and bloomed. An extended growing season, the kind Ireland has, is necessary to get a Flower. My first attempts to get the plants to blossom in our shorter growing season failed as I got artichokes but no Flowers. I tried numerous varieties and started the plant earlier and earlier in the greenhouse. Last year, the Artichokes went to flower, and I was euphoric.
However, after a day in the garden sunshine, the bowl of Artichoke Flower Essence was drained, and I could just see the tail of one happy neighborhood dog trotting out of sight after drinking the entire bowl of the Flower Essence! Those were the last Flowers of the season on my Artichoke plants so I had to start over again this season. This year, I hardly let the Artichoke Flowers out of my sight until the Essence was safely in the bottling room.
Woad was another Flower the Angels and Elementals suggested I grow several years ago, but I had never seen it before I grew it. The plant is a biennial, taking two years before it blossoms, but what a blossom! I was very happy with our Woad harvest this season and am delighted that the plant has now self-seeded throughout Ben’s grape vines for continued harvests down the road.
The Colorado Wildflower Essences were the “out of the blue” project of the season. Alli Howe, the GHF staffer who made them, has been working here at the farm with a great openness to partnership with Angels and Elementals. Alli has a lot of Elemental energy about her as well, meaning that she has a close connection to the divinity in the natural world through long association. When she went back this spring to where she had lived in Colorado, the Angels and Elementals encouraged me to encourage her to make Flower Essences. She had the momentum for this kind of work and was joyful about doing it. How grateful I am that she was willing to follow the Angels and Elementals all over the mountains to find such dynamic Wildflowers.
One of the things the Angels have always said about Flower Essences is that they are a way for those of us who don’t travel or can’t travel to fully experience the energetic gifts of other places and regions. These Colorado Wildflower Essences are such a wonderful example of this. They bring us the resilient, determined, focused, clarified wisdom of these high mountain Wildflowers. What a blessing that Alli has taken to working with Angels and Elementals like a duck to water as the quality of the Essence really depends on this communication. This was also true of the two Essences from northern California, Redwood and Sweet Annie. The Angels and Elementals asked me to ask long time Green Hope Farm friend Diane Chira to work on Flower Essences for Green Hope Farm and she committed to the project with such dedication and focus. She too was a natural, and I am most grateful for her work.
How does a New Collection come together each year?
The Angels and Elementals see to that in no uncertain terms.
After working on the Green Hope Farm Cookbook at a leisurely pace during the summer Alli and I renewed our focus on the project during September. With papers and supervisory cats spread out on several large tables in the kitchen, we wrote and illustrated this book, hoping to wrap the project in time for a fall printing. I had told the Angels and Elementals that I would get definitions from them for the new group of Flower Essences as soon as the Cookbook was finished and off to the printer.
Apparently the Angels and Elementals wait for no deadline! Suddenly Alli was like a whirling dervish. After staying up to the wee hours of the morning, she would arrive each morning with pages of pages of illustrated recipes. I think the Angels and Elementals were filling her with so much energy that she hardly needed to sleep. And her cat, Penny was supervising as well while our Bella worked the day shift here! With Alli setting this electric pace, we were able to finish the Cookbook very fast.
And just in time as even during the final days organizing the Cookbook for the printer, the Angels started explaining the new Essences to me at all times of day and night. I could feel them leaning in, like an energy at my back, pressing me to get the definitions they were giving me on paper and out to you.
I started to carry a book with me everywhere I went to write down everything they were telling me. Much of the year our conversations are more relaxed and they usually don’t interrupt me whatever I am doing (even when it is some extremely mindless and silly occupation that I am sure they know is a complete waste of my time). But they KNOW when the new Flower Essences are needed for humanity and they KNEW these were needed NOW.
Consequently, the process of transcribing the descriptions of this year’s new Flower Essences went incredibly fast. I mean, how hard is it to type dictation? And that was how these definitions were flowing. I think this is partly due to the number of years I have now been talking to Flowers and the Angels and Elementals and also partly because these Essences needed to be launched ASAP so I was given extra help. They even sent in data in crystal clear dreams! Sometimes it can take me MONTHS to delve into a Flower and hear what it has to say about itself- NOT THIS YEAR! This group was READY!
How do you view this new group of Flower Essences?
WOW! They are just so different than last year’s new introductions and for many reasons. I see this as most heartening. Last year’s new Essences offered wonderful support for fine tuning our electrical system especially our upper chakras. I felt we were getting help to receive new high vibrational energies and assimilate them. The New 2013 Essences couldn’t be more different in feeling or purpose. They have a roll up your sleeves and get going energy that is strong, practical and accessible. They have very specific gifts to help us with humanity’s overarching process of unity consciousness and their energy suggests the time for this work is NOW.
It is one thing to bandy back and forth this term, unity consciousness, in a world that feels a long way from unity anything. But I remember in the early ‘80s how the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war and how bleak that felt. I was a part of citizen to citizen peace exchange with folks from Russia. I made friends with some very sweet Soviet women who mostly wanted to go right from the airplane to JC Penney’s to get properly fitting bras and then sit back and talk about foraging for mushrooms on their weekends in the country. But could small groups of humanity like this really help keep the world from nuclear war? Yes and it was a movement of ordinary people living out the theory of the hundredth monkey.
So too with unity consciousness. Despite what seems to be happening on the surface, other forces are at work. I find these Essences extremely encouraging in this regard. They don’t suggest that we pay any attention to what seems to be the reality but instead, they help us dive into a new experience of reality. They also offer concrete support for moving beyond apparent differences and relationship roadblocks that break down unity consciousness. They are Flower Essences that seriously have our backs as we do this work, and they speak from a place of great confidence and certainty that LOVE AND UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS WILL PREVAIL. I for one am very heartened by all they offer us and the reality they suggest is revealing itself in our midst!