Good vibration from the essence of the Moors

Jenny Howarth is becoming a familiar figure as she wanders Ilkley Moor in search of healing flowers.

Homeopathist Jenny is bottling the essences of Ilkley Moor to create a new range of body care products based on heather, bracken and gorse, amongst other ingredients.

She says her flower essences tap into the Moor’s legendary health-giving energies.

“The products are made from moorland plants and the energy of the Wharfe Valley,” she says. “I’m pulling it all together. Ilkley as a spa town has long been associated with healing and health.”

Jenny, originally from the Midlands, came to Yorkshire 30 years ago to study French and Russian at Bradford University before doing a PhD on the languages of Yugoslavia. After a varied career working in exports for an engineering firm, for the Open University and then in the public sector, she retrained as a homoeopathist when her two daughters were young.

A homoeopathist for 15 years, Jenny makes her new range of body care products by hand at her small complementary therapy room in the centre of Ilkley.

She was inspired to start her own range of flower essences around seven years ago and is using them in her new body care collection.

“Along with homeopathic remedies, I’ve always used flower essences. There are lots of ranges all over the world and they have their strengths but I got to thinking why are we using these from all over the world when Ilkley has such a huge healing past and history? I started to explore it and set about thinking what encapsulated the energy of Ilkley?

“Although Ilkley is known as a spa town, fewer people are aware of the ancient, spiritual and healing energy connected to the area,” says Jenny, who is also a Reiki master teacher, and runs Ilkley Complementary Therapies in the town.

She carried out some research and looked into the type of plants found on Ilkley Moor, such as bracken, crowberry and soft rush. Next she started to experiment by making flower essences in a similar way to Edward Bach, the founder of Bach Flower Remedies. Bach was a Harley Street doctor and a surgeon before taking a role at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. He started to experiment with flower essences and left London in 1930 to look for a new and more natural system of medicine.

“He would go out in the morning with a little pipette and take the dew drop that settled in the flower thinking that would contain the real energy of the flower,” says Jenny. “He worked on that basis but it wasn’t long before he realised that life was too short to be going around with a pipette every morning so he developed what’s generally known as the sun method of making essences.”

Jenny explains that this is a way of creating an essence from the flowers by using a glass bowl filled with spring water, rather than tap water. The flowers are floated on the surface of the water and then the bowl is placed in sunshine for two to three hours so that the water in the bowl takes on the “vibration” of the whole plant.

“Everything is in vibration and water is a prime carrier of those vibrations. It isn’t the scent, it is the vibration so in making it that way you have a bowl of water that has taken on the energy of the plant. It doesn’t smell of the flower, unlike essential oils, but it has the power of the plant.”

As well as taking flower essences, Jenny makes vibrational essences from rocks. “I’ve made several essences from the carved rocks on Ilkley Moor because those are really key to the spiritual healing history on Ilkley Moor,” she says.

She named her new range after the Roman Wharfedale Goddess, Verbeia.

“There’s lots of debate about Verbeia,” says Jenny. “She was a Roman Celtic Goddess and there’s a carving in All Saints’ Church which is an old altar stone.” After experimenting with a number of plants and rocks, she chose seven for her Verbeia Moorland essences range; heather, gorse, bracken, crowberry, winberry, soft rush and Flyflot. “I wasn’t looking for flowers that were exclusive to Ilkley,” says Jenny. “But these seven essences encapsulate what Ilkley Moor is.”

Jenny, who is a practitioner with the British Flower and Vibrational Essences Association, has had her essences tested by a chemist. In trials many people reported that the essences enhanced their lives.

Heather was found to increase energy, improve sleep and help refocus. Bracken was reported to cleanse, purify and bring about a sense of stability and calmness. Winberry was said to help with procrastination and with making important changes in life.

Jenny makes the original tinctures without cutting any plants and is careful to leave the moorland as she found it.

“Someone once said to me ‘do you have to have barrow loads of heather?’ but no what I do is I bend the plants into the water so they are still growing. I peg the plants down into the water with bamboo twigs and leave them there. I generally leave them for three hours and go back to them and bottle them.” She uses these 
flower essences in her homeopathy consultations, but decided that to appeal 
to a wider market, she needed to develop them into a range of body care products.

She now combines her Verbeia flower essences with essential oils to create a range of body care products.

“They are not all organic but they are free of harmful chemicals, SLS and parabens.”

Jenny also runs workshops to show people how to create their own flower essence products.

To find out more about Jenny Howarth visit www.verbeiaessences.co.uk