Making mother tinctures

The Bach Centre's heritage

Dr Bach taught his assistants Nora Weeks and Victor Bullen how to make remedies and all about the plants that should be used.

Nora and Victor taught John Ramsell, who in turn trained his daughter Judy Ramsell Howard. Judy is the current Managing Director of the Centre, and she and her husband Keith between them have fifty years' experience of making remedies.

The Centre has always been involved in making mother tinctures, and that continues today, even though we are no longer directly involved in the commercialisation of remedies.

How remedies are made

Two methods are used to make remedies. Most of the more delicate flowers are prepared using the sun method. This involves floating the flower heads in pure water for three hours, in direct sunlight.

Woodier plants, and those that bloom when the sun is weak, are generally prepared by the boiling method - i.e. boiling the flowering parts of the plant for half an hour in pure water.

In both cases once heat has transferred the energy in the flowers to the water, the energised water is mixed with an equal quantity of brandy. This mix is the mother tincture.

Mother tincture is further diluted into brandy (at a ratio of two drops of mother tincture to 30ml of brandy) to make the stock bottles that you see in the shops.

Remedy-making today

Up until 1991 the Bach Centre prepared, diluted and bottled its own remedies at Mount Vernon and sent them out to shops all over the world.

But as world demand grew the Centre was unable to keep up. This is why we took the decision between 1991 and 1993 to transfer the commercial side of remedy making to an independent family-owned company called Nelsons.

This left the Bach Centre free to concentrate on education, and on providing help and advice to those who need it.

Judy and Keith on behalf of the Bach Centre continue to supervise Nelsons' preparation of mother tinctures to make sure everything is as it should be.

Some of the plants used grow wild in the Bach Centre garden, while others come from open countryside nearby. The remedy-making team, guided by Judy and Keith, know of and still use locations first identified by Dr Bach in the 1930s.

Mother tinctures are still made by hand and in small quantities. Visit the Centre on a sunny spring or summer morning and you will likely see the bowls laid out in the garden to catch the sun.