My life with Flowers brings many surprises.

Each growing season ushers in new Flower Essences that amaze me with their power, wisdom, and healing love.

It’s a little bit like falling in love with an old friend. Many old friends really.
Roadside weeds that I have visited with for decades unexpectedly reveal the hidden depths of their healing wisdom. Familiar wildflowers tell me it is time to become Flower Essences and describe themselves in entirely unexpected ways.

Over the years, it has become clear that Nature is taking me and Green Hope Farm on an orchestrated journey. Each season, it is time for certain Flower Essences to step forward and join in to help the people and animals that we serve.

There are many mysteries behind this unfolding, but I am grateful for each Flower whose time has come.

And so far this year, despite rain and more rain, these noble blossoms have offered themselves as Flower Essences and explained their gifts.

Burdock– Arctium minus
Burdock holds so much wisdom, it is hard to know where to start in describing its gifts. To begin, Burdock holds particular wisdom about the blood. One piece of this wisdom is that it helps the red blood cells with any issues of low oxygen transport capacity. This and other blood wisdom held by Burdock makes it a useful Essence during any illness especially any that concerns blood health. More generally, Burdock will help us get to the bottom of any healing crisis to bring the core issue to light, then it will offer a template for finding our health again. This skill at getting to the root of the issue means Burdock helps with any cleansing process. Additionally, this is a very supportive Essence for any illness involving issues of discernment including cancer, a condition in which discernment about what cells in the body should be grown and which should not has been affected, Burdock sorts the wheat from the chaff on a cellular level and offers information about how we can do this ourselves while also completely protecting and preserving our health. As with all Flower Essences, this is done by Burdock offering our electrical system a roadmap for these skills, one that our electrical system can copy and benefit from if it is helpful. I can’t recommend this dynamo enough and have now added it to Immune Support, Recovery, and Precious Blood.


Elecampane– Inula helenium
All issues of sunlight management especially proper assimilation of sunlight’s gifts. Elecampane will help us get the most from whatever sunlight we get when we are not getting enough sunlight. This makes it an excellent remedy for Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is also helpful for those of us in regions where the ozone layer is thin. There is both a positive and a negative to living in such regions as ozone protects us from higher vibrations not lower vibrations. Our challenge is to learn to assimilate this higher vibration coming through more strongly in places with thin ozone and Elecampane can help us do this.


Hops Humulus Lupulus I’m very excited to bring this Essence into our repetoire. First used in ancient Lemuria, Hops strongly encourages physical and spiritual growth. Its signature is its fast rate of growth. Hops can grow into a vine 20-40 feet in a single growing season. With links to the sixth chakra, Hops Essence offers helpful information to the pituitary gland, hence its connection to healthy and manifest physical growth. It also supports our circulatory system, particularly blood vessel elasticity. Linked to the etheric body, it helps the etheric body and ethereal fluidium to be their most vibrant and healthy. Hops has a playful energy that will help us find this in ourselves. One dividend of its support for spiritual growth is that it improves group interaction. Additionally, it will help plant growth when unusual weather has slowed growth patterns. As an herb it is used as a preservative in beer and as a sleep aid, but these talents do not at all suggest its immense strengths as a Flower Essence.


Lobelia– Lobelia spicata
Supports us to make peace with major life decisions. This wild Lobelia helps us to get grounded and settled in our life changing decisions so we can proceed as calmly and courageously as possible. When I found a bank of this pale blue spiked beauty blooming in a place I had never seen it before, it explained its gifts right away and offered its immediate support for a situation I was working to change in my life. Soon after I found great clarity about what I needed to do and felt the strength I had been seeking for many months to do what I had to do. Consequently, I can attest to Lobelia’s strength and clarity as an ally when difficult and major change is necessary.

Miterwort–Mitella diphylla
The base of this plant has a pair of leaves across from each other and a long straight stalk that bears exquisite and tiny cone shaped blossoms with fringed edges almost like snowflakes all turned in a variety of directions. This flowering stalk looks a bit like an elegant cell tower and that is the exact offering of its Flower Essence. Miterwort helps us to hear each other better especially during arguments. It is especially good for partnerships, but will support anyone who would like to listen better AND hear what is actually being said.


Starflower– Trientalis borealis
For clarifying and smoothing the flow of electrical current in the etheric or memory body. Starflower also orchestrates a crisper connection between energy centers including the main chakras and also the secondary nadis. Consider this one if your head feels fuzzy, you feel uncoordinated as if signals are not getting from one part of yourself to another or if you feel your electrical wiring is in any way misfiring.


White Baneberry– Actaea pachypoda
Blood health, offering especially helpful information to the white blood cells as it defends the body against infectious disease and foreign bodies. This new one has also been added to Immune Support and Precious Blood.


Wild Lily of the Valley also known as Canadian Mayflower Maianthemum canadense
A pixie Flower that encourages us to remember our connection to all things wild, elemental, sacred, and true.

“The Wild Lily of the Valley that you sent is lovely. It gives me a feeling of being  deeply rooted or connected to the heart of Earth and Sacred Feminine energy.” PL Keswick, VA

Here in the rain forest, the shameless slugs munch 24/7

They are on every surface of every plant and a random sampling of them suggests that every last slug is healthy and gaining weight.

Additionally, they have proven untroubled by the enormous quantities of Sluggo that I have spread everywhere. In fact, this organic sugar coated iron pellet material said to stop slugs in their tracks appears to simply whet their appetite for their favorite food- tender young Red Shiso plants.

And so, in an act of sheer desperation, I have protected the last few Red Shiso plants left alive in the gardens with individual SLUG MOATS.

Each SLUG MOAT is a small plastic party cup with its bottom cut out ( Thank you William). Each encircles a sad little Red Shiso plant.

Will this work?

So far, so good. I have seen slugs trying to climb the slipper slopes of the SLUG MOATS. but none appear to have gotten up and over. Our crop may rebound yet. If not, we could try marketing SLUG MOATS. They work at least as well as all that Sluggo and they have a sort of catchy name. William are you ready with the scissors?

This is the kind of crowd us Country Mice are most used to- a bevy of summer blossoms.

But last weekend, the dear man who has made our bottle boxes in all those playful colors for the last twenty years, Frank St Aubin of Bay State Box, gave us two tickets to a Red Sox game. He has been a fan for close to eight decades which gives him some serious street credit as a Red Sox die hard fan.

And believe me, this kind of time spent as a fan is de rigeur to be considered a REAL fan. Jim found this out when he was 17 and mentioned to a old family friend that he was a Red Sox fan and the man told him in no uncertain terms that Jim had not been alive long enough to be considered a fan.

As this suggests, going to a Red Sox game is a serious big deal to most people in northern New England. It certainly was a big deal for me and Jim. Most people we know can tell you exactly the last time they went to a game, where they sat, what the weather was, and then can share more stats from the game than anyone really needs to know.

For me it had been a long long time since I went to a game in Fenway. In fact it was 1980 and I went to a Detroit game in the rain and sat behind one of the poles way way way up behind first base. For Jim, it was June 1998 when Lizzie’s eighth grade class trip was a trip to Fenway on a hot Sunday afternoon. High points of this trip included one of Jim’s student’s throwing up the bag of candy he had just eaten ON JIM.

Since we were lucky enough to get tickets for a Saturday night game, we decided to rendezvous with Emily on Saturday morning. She is working at a camp on Cape Cod this summer and we miss her! Being naive Country Mice, we did not expect the bumper to bumper traffic south out of Boston.

To travel the twenty or thirty miles from Boston to Plymouth where we met Emily took us several hours!!!!!!!!

In Meriden there are no traffic jams unless you consider the scene when it starts to rain and all the Honeybees try to get into the hive at the same time.

I give all of you courageous people who face any other sort of traffic as part of your daily lives serious props for hanging in there. Nota bene: If I had to face that kind of traffic to get to water on a hot summer’s day, I would buy a kiddie pool and call it a day.

The sea of people at Plymouth rock also startled us Country Mice. There was so much traffic we couldn’t do anything but drive by the hideous mausoleum plunked over Plymouth rock ( And what is that all about anyways? Does anyone really believe Miles Standish even saw that rock let alone step foot on it as he got off the Mayflower?).

When we needed a cold drink, we couldn’t find anywhere to park to patronize all the inviting tourist filled smoothie cafes. Instead we had to go where apparently all of America is going, Ye Olde Dunkin Donuts in Ye Olde Gas Station. We really have this tourist thing down pat, don’t we?

Soon it was time to leave Emily to fight her way through traffic back onto the Cape while we fought traffic back into and across Boston. It’s a city we have known for thirty years and still we found ourselves navigating across the city by looking out the windows to use the Prudential Center as our guidepost. Yes, we really are Country Mice. No Tom Toms, no GPS, not even a current map.

But it was all worth it.

Jim outside the shrine. At 52 maybe old enough to be considered a junior fan.

Look at our seats over the opposing team dugout. Leave it to me to be fascinated by the pre game turf management activities- the raking, the smoothing, the clipping, the watering.


Here Jim watches as the place begins to fill with 38,000 people- more than we see in a year in our world. It was the only nice summer night in weeks and we were practically spitting distance to the field (not behind one of those green poles like last time). And the game was fabulous! We even saw Big Papi hit a three run home run!

Jon Lester pitched a great game for us and my boyfriend Jacoby even stole a couple of bases for me.

When Lester tired, we saw 100 mph pitches from the relief pitcher. And during any lull in activity, we yucked it up with the season ticket holders who wanted to know HOW ON EARTH we had landed such nice seats for the night. We also ate peanuts and cracker jacks and sang “Take me Out to the Ball Game.” At once point, Wally, the Green Monster mascot came over and gave Jim a hug. As a fellow animal, he must have recognized a serious Country Mouse when he saw one.


Or maybe he was just trying to give Jim the gumption to take on Boston traffic one more time on our way home to sleepy Meriden, population 309.