In the last week there has been another rise in vibration on our planet. This is good news for Earth and all humanity, but sometimes complex in the immediate aftermath of the shift. Why is this so? These vibrational upticks require us to accommodate these vibrations in our physical bodies, and that requires effort on the part of our electrical systems.

Flower Essences are all about helping our electrical systems tune up to higher vibrations so we can make these higher vibrations our own vibration. This means Flower Essences are a very helpful tool during these vibrational shifts.

This last week many of you have been ordering Flower Essences for your eyesight. This particular energy rise does seem to have been challenging for our eyesight. Rosa Glauca is the one that has been flying off the shelves the most. Bottle Gentian and Eyebright are two others that are going out the door in a steady stream as they too are extremely supportive for eye concerns.

For many it’s our head where we notice the higher vibrations first. If headaches, unusual memory glitches, or a general fuzziness in your head has been something you have noticed in the last week or two, it could be your sixth chakra adjusting to the new energies. Snapdragon, Grapefruit, Silverrod, Breathe, Lemon Balm are just some that might hold helpful information for this transition. We have also found that just about everyone needs Flower Essence support for frayed nerves right now- Sarah Van Fleet Rose, Feverfew, Outburst, Jewelweed, and Indian Pipe are just a few of the ones that have felt particularly supportive to you right now.

Not surprisingly, I lean heavily on our combination remedy Flow Free during these kinds of energetic shifts, and I suggest it to just about everyone. I also try to keep very hydrated. Our work during these upticks is to keep the energies moving through us and to attune our systems to this new planetary vibration. Flow Free and being hydrated help with this task.

As these shifts can leave us feeling very spaced out, our Grounding mix is another that is very helpful. Grounding is all about keeping us physically present and fully in our bodies. The marriage of holding the new vibrations in our electrical system and being fully present is the goal during these energy upticks. Doing this helps us and humanity tremendously.

We have all heard the metaphor of how cleaning up our part of the pond affects the whole pond. There is deep healing change for ourselves and all creation that comes as we make manifest these beautiful high vibrations flooding into the planet to support us and lift us up.

I know this can seem like a missive from a naïve Pollyanna. The surface news is dire with rising violence and incivility. However, great and good changes are afoot on this precious planet, and as each of us shine our love and light in the world, we are a part of these changes!

Between hauling buckets of maple sap, stoking the fires of our maple sugaring evaporator and finishing off big pots of maple syrup in the kitchen, I’m warming up for the spring sprint of a million garden tasks AND some unusual summer projects as well.

With all the uncertainties of our erratic climate, it’s not clear when spring will join us. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe a month from now. But I’m guessing sooner than later.

While last year we still had a couple feet of snow on the ground on this day, this year it’s a whole different ball of wax. Not much snow all winter and now greening grass. In fact, it sounds like it may warm up so fast in the next week that our maple sugaring could come to a rapid end.

For maple sugaring we need alternating cold nights below freezing and days in the high 30’s and 40’s. This up and down is necessary for the sap to run. This is because the sap only runs when it’s rising up past the buckets into the branches of the trees as the temperatures rise and then when it’s going down past the buckets on its return to the roots of the trees where it is stored in winter. When it gets warm and remains warm, the sap stays up in the trees and the tree begins to leaf out. Sugaring is over.

That’s the theory anyways and one that the trees often disregard. I love how frequently on a day when it’s a bit brisk and doesn’t quite seem ideal for the sap to run, the sap buckets are brimming over. It’s equally interesting on a text book day for sap when the trees hardly run. Trees are alive with a mind of their own, and I love this!

So today it sounds like it is going to soar into the 50’s and 60’s and then stay warm. I’m not entirely clear how fast this will end our sugaring for this season. It could end swiftly.

In any case, there will be plenty to do once the sugaring is over. I have pruned about half of our fruit trees and need to finish them before things really warm up. I also have started seed flats and have many, many more seeds to start in the next few weeks.

This year I am starting an especially large amount of cut Flowers i.e. annual Flowers that make good Flowers in Flower arrangements.

For those of you who remember that very, VERY thick notebook I had for organizing Elizabeth’s wedding in May of 2012- well…… the NOTEBOOK IS BACK. Emily is getting married in August to Charlie Carey. Their wedding is in Maine where they met and fell in love, and it’s quite a bit bigger than Elizabeth’s wedding. Like five times bigger. While many of the details will not be in my hands, I wanted to do the Flowers. Emily loves Flowers and Flowers love her. And I did the Flowers for Lizzie’s wedding and that went well. When I made the offer I wondered how complicated it could be to do a bigger wedding with a church, a formal reception, nine bridesmaids and a flower girl named Grace.

Oh quite a bit more complicated.

On the kitchen table there is fresh maple syrup for anyone brave enough to linger near me and my WEDDING FLOWERS NOTEBOOK. Everyone in the household knows it is best to eat and run, because the kitchen table has become COMMAND CENTER for my plans to grow a heck of a lot of cut Flowers.

Already I am boring everyone to death with conversations about vase shapes, boutineer construction and how to properly condition each kind of cut Flower. As people sprint through the kitchen desperate to get a snack without running into me, I see their eyes glaze over as I toss out pithy comments like, “Did you know that Zinnias are best preserved by a quick dip in boiling water followed by a night in tepid water in a cool place?”

They didn’t know, and they don’t care. They just want to finish their pancakes in peace.

And please, did I really have to pause the Downton Abbey finale a half dozen times to look at the floral arrangements?

Thank goodness I can bore all of you with details here!

In fact, no time like the present to set the stage.

Here are some photos of our 2012 efforts. In the face of 10 bouquets, 20 table vases, arrangements at the church and boutineers/corsages for a cast of thousands these earlier efforts seem like amateur hour, but a sweet sort of amateur hour. Let’s hope I can pull it all off again in Maine!

First a wedding cake I did but that I am not doing this time. I offered the baker of Emily and Charlie’s cake Flowers for her efforts, but even I could be talked off the ledge of doing the Flowers and the cake while also being the MOB.

Our ridiculously low key Flower set up for the last wedding as we only had a couple bouquets to do.

Note slave/friend/GHF staff goddess Catherine Boorady at the sink slaving away. I booked her for this wedding too, bless her brave soul.

One more thought about the Downton Abbey finale. Preoccupied as I was by the Flower arrangements at Edith’s wedding, I could hardly give a hoot how things turned out for anyone upstairs or downstairs. So too, I now zero in ONLY on Flower arrangements in all photos.

Here’s a photo of the bouquet from my last wedding bouquet effort. I think I was related to the bride but can’t quite remember- My head is too full with data about days to bloom, stem wraps and floral preservatives.

How do you spell single-minded? I’d say you spell it FLOWERS.

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!

It’s snowing here at the farm. Our December trip to St John feels like it was a long time ago in a place far away. However, I want to share with you some of my lovely experiences with the Flowers of St John.

St John, USVI and the Caribbean in general went through an extreme drought beginning in the spring and lingering into the fall. When we arrived, rain had finally returned, and there were many storms, quick and intense, while we were on the island.

The arrival of rain after the drought meant many plants were blooming out of season. This meant I got to meet with a number of Flowers I had never seen in my many other trips to St John. All of my other trips have happened in the months of December, January and February so I have always missed Flowers that bloom at other times of the year.

Not only had the rain rejuvenated the vegetation on the island into a state of joyous self-expression, but all life was celebrating. There were many more Flowers everywhere AND butterflies covered the island in veritable clouds of soft white. I had never seen anything like it. Everywhere we walked, butterflies rose up all around us. It was a glimpse of what the world might be like without pesticides.

Sometimes I have found the Nature Spirits/Elementals of a place to be either reticent or in a place of withdrawal from humankind. On this trip to St John, the Nature Spirits were extremely extroverted, loving and helpful. To pause next to any plant was to visit with a dear friend.

As I walked the island trails, Nature Spirits greeted me with great waves of love. They helped me find Flowers I was seeking with panache and humor. I had not been to St John in five years so being greeted by old and new Flower Elemental friends was very precious.

I particularly needed the Elementals help to find Flowers because one of the places where I met many Flowers over the years is no longer open to visitors. The Maho Bay campground where we always stayed is no longer. I knew every inch of that property’s vegetation and knew where I could find many Flower friends, but the property has passed into private ownership. We found it gated and guarded by dogs and cameras. I could only blow a kiss to the precious Jerusalem Thorn Tree I knew and loved and many other Flower friends found previously in Maho scrubland.

One Flower I knew it was vital for me to find in a new place was Christmas Bush (Chromolaena odorata). This is a key ingredient in our Wound Healing mix and a deeply important Essence for wound healing in its own right. I was grievously low on this Flower Essence but also knew I had always made this Essence from a patch of Christmas Bush at Maho.

Driving with me anywhere is somewhat of a slow boat as I am always asking people to go slowly and often asking them to stop the car so I can go examine a Flower. This is never more true than on St John. So many important Flowers grow on the side of roads, and I am always looking for them there.

I went on every last car mission because the up and down journeys over the mountainous terrain gave me much scrubby bush in which to search for Flowers.

One day descending on the switchbacks into Coral Bay, I caught a glimpse of white, the color of Christmas Bush Flower. It was a very quick glimpse, but I felt it was Christmas Bush. Every time we went up or down that road I would look for that patch. Each trip I tried to count the curves to see how far down the road I would need to walk to see if this flash of white was indeed what I thought it was. While my husband, St Jim, was happy to stop the car on most roads, this was one steep decline where it was just too dangerous to linger because of speeding vehicles climbing and descending the treacherous mountainside road.

This cluster of Christmas Bush began to send me a big wave of love when we passed them in the car. I would literally feel this love blow into my heart and fill it with joy. On our last day on the island, Jim and I parked at the top of the road and walked down to the cluster of Christmas Bush. In true St John style a number of people stopped to see if we needed a lift but no, we were just taking a dangerous stroll down this narrow road. When I got to the patch it was a sweet reunion. I asked who wanted to be made into an Essence and a number of blossoming heads volunteered.

Will’s girlfriend and GHF staff goddess Sarah Porter went on many Flower missions with me. She had a marvelous knack of noticing when the Flower Elementals were trying to get her attention. At one point, I was examining a lovely clump of Inkberry (Scaevola plumieri), and she looked up to see a blossoming Bay Cedar (Suriana maritima) right above the Inkberry. I had looked for Bay Cedar in its old haunts where it wasn’t in bloom, so I was very happy Sarah had heard it call from a new place.

At another moment, while I looked at the very interesting black blossoms of the Pipe Organ cactus (Pilosocereus royenii), Sarah noticed Psychilis macconnelliae (Psychilis macconnelliae) right below and behind the cactus. Here she is visiting with this gorgeous orchid friend.

At another moment, I was waxing on about my endless search to find Tamarind blossoms while lingering under the branches of an old Tamarind tree. There is a beautiful old Tamarind edging one of the gorgeous beaches on the island, and I have always visited the tree but never noticed any blossoms. Sarah, of course, found blossoms! As I met the Flowers for the first time after a twenty five year search for her blossoms, it was a wonderful moment. The Flowers are so lovely and unusual reflecting the wise, steadfast, steady and generous nature of the tree itself.

Tamarind has been one of the new ones that the Angels have requested we send to people this January even as I had not yet found out what the Flower Essence is for! Yesterday I got the beginning of a description that I share here. The photos I took do not do justice to this Tree, her Flowers or her Essence. Maybe someday I will get a chance to do better.

Sarah hugs the Tamarind

Tamarind pod and leaves

Tamarind blossoms

Tamarind (Tamarindus indica) Helps us stay grounded and rooted to the eternal verities during times of intense emotion and chaos. Helps us find stability, balance serenity and calm even as things explode, hurriance emotions and rage and it appears all is lost. I AM serenity.