VERDITER
BOTANICAL DEWS
Intro
All Flower Essences
Flower Combinations
Custom Blends
Ecoregions
Bog / Water
Tuckamore / Wood
Meadow / Fire
Boreal Forest / Earth
Coastal Barrens / Metal
About the practice
Contact
Further Information
This section offers contextual notes related to the work and ideas that inform Verditer. It is intended as a way of tracing the relationship between perception, meaning, and experience within this practice.
A central thread in this work is the question of belief. Rather than treating it as something separate from experience, this inquiry considers how perception, expectation, attention, and interpretation participate in shaping what we come to understand as real. The sections that follow can be read in this light. They present areas of exploration and patterns of experience rather than definitive statements about anything.
Belief, perception, and experience
Part of my work in developing Verditer has been finding ways to bridge an artistic practice with a field-based inquiry into flower essences. This process has involved a significant amount of doubt. Over time I have come to know this uncertainty as part of the work. Questions of belief and skepticism feel central not only to this practice, but to broader questions of how we perceive change and meaning in our relationship to nature and well-being.
A question that continues to be persistent is the role of belief in healing and perception. There has been a lot of research around the placebo effect. It’s a term that I am quite familiar with in relation to flower essences. Yes the placebo effect is very real. But rather than the question of whether we need to believe in something for it to have an effect, I’m more interested in how belief itself may be one of the conditions through which experience becomes organized and meaningful. Doubt and uncertainty appear to play a pivotal role in this process because they ask us to ask more of ourselves internally.
In my own observation, flower essences seem to invite attention to this question rather than resolve it, moving us into more intimacy with our experience. When they are appropriately selected, flower essences effects are often described as subtle and not always immediately perceptible, sometimes only becoming clear through reflection over time. Despite repeatedly observing shifts and changes that feel meaningful and supportive in both my own experience and in working with others, their mechanism remains uncertain.
Part of the persistence of doubt seems connected to an underlying expectation that effects should be explainable through a conventional mechanistic paradigm. I’m aware that this framework influences how these practices might be dismissed or questioned. There is simultaneously a strong desire for certainty, particularly among those seeking meaningful support or a clearer sense of direction in their lives. This includes my own desire to offer something widely considered to be helpful and true. Perhaps there is something needed in the deeper structural work of both this mechanistic expectation and this desire for certainty. It could be that uncertainty is an important aspect of self-healing.
The process of working with plants and flowers can nevertheless be a beautiful uncovering of our deepest internal constructions when approached through direct experience and when supported with practices like mindful observation or intention.
Contemporary discussions in cognitive science around how perception and reality are constructed through attention, expectation, and embodied experience, point toward similar questions about the role of belief in shaping lived experience. The reasearch of Dr. Mark Miller and that of Dr. Antonio Damasio are both of particular interest in relation to this.
Rather than seeking to resolve this one way or another, this aspect of the work points to how it may function as a perceptual and relational process involved in shaping how we encounter both inner experience and the outer world.
The following sections introduce some of the ideas and areas of curiosity that inform flower essence work more broadly.
Cosmic view
Humans and plants share a deep evolutionary connection, having exchanged energy and information continuously over hundreds of thousands of years. Considering this, patterns of growth and expression are likely not isolated to individual organisms but shared across living systems.
The Flower Essence Society describes flower essence therapy as a way of working with natural correspondences between human psychology and patterns of growth in nature (expressed in their forms, colours, fragrances, and vital qualities). This suggests the possibility that inner experience and natural form are not separate, but arise through related organizing principles, and that in some sense, the whole may be reflected in the part across scales.
Flowers have also long been associated with emotional and symbolic meaning. Perhaps archetypal qualities are recognized in them because these patterns are also active within human experience.
Frequency and vibration
Flower essences are often described in terms of resonance or vibration. In Taoist philosophy and Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qi is understood as a dynamic field of relationship between internal states and the rhythms of nature.
From this perspective, matter can be approached as an energetic process rather than a fixed substance. Light, sound, and colour are commonly described through frequency and oscillation, which invites further inquiry into whether emotional and cognitive experience might also be understood as patterned movement within the body-mind.
We tend to believe thoughts and emotions arise from the material aspect of the body-mind (emerging from the brain essentially) but this is a fundamental framework that may not necessarily be accurate. The body-mind understood as an energetic process might arise within larger universal patterns that include tempoary movements of thought and emotion.
Frequency in this context then may be understood simply as persistent, consistent repetition over time, whether in sensation, thought, or feeling. In my experience plants appear to express stable patterns that can be experienced interoceptively (inner perception in the body).
Sympathetic resonance
Within flower essence therapy, it is thought that coherence in one field influences coherence in another through resonance, rather than direct causation or biochemical interaction. The analogy of tuning forks is often used to describe this: when one is struck, another tuned to a similar frequency may begin to respond.
Within this framework, the essence is not a force acting on the system but a coherent pattern the system encounters. Water is the medium through which this interaction is thought to take place, given its abundance in the human body and in biological forms.
The body’s emotional intelligence
It is now generally understood that emotions are a source of deep wisdom within the cognitive process. They are foundational to one's capacity for making meaning out of experience and directly influence the ability to think, remember, act and be present for life and relationships.
Contemporary affective neuroscience suggests emotions are not fixed reactions but are constructed experiences. They are a blend of bodily sensations, past memories, learned emotional concepts, contextual cues, and mental interpretations. This means that what we call an emotion is the brain's anticipatory process for making sense of a particular complex internal feeling state. Over time, patterns can become ingrained in the body and mind, sometimes below conscious awareness.
Within flower essence practice, resonance is understood as the relationship between these emotional patterns and specific archetypal plant expressions. The ability to name an emotion is an example of an already powerful tool for accessing its energetic form. A flower essence is thought to be supportive by meeting an emotional constellation, whether conscious or not, with a coherent resonant picture through which the body-mind has the possibility to self-organize, reflect and gain insight.
Water memory
The recent scientific work of bioengineer Dr. Gerald Pollack, Nobel laureate Dr. Luc Montagnier, and biologist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho has involved the study of water's properties, phases and memory capabilities.
While their unconventional work looking at the organizational and structural capacities of water (sometimes referred to as “water memory”) remain contested within mainstream science, their work continues to open questions about how subtle information and coherence might arise in the relationship between water and hydrophillic bodies. Considering that flower remedies are made in water and potentized through sunlight, their research has the potential to expand the scientific understanding of their capacities and interactions within the human system.