The sun method and the boiling method

Every one of the 38 remedies is made in one of two ways, and both would look at home in a farmhouse kitchen. Twenty are made by the sun method: flowers floated on a bowl of spring water in morning sunlight. Eighteen are made by the boiling method: flowering twigs simmered in a pan. That is the entire manufacturing secret, and it is no secret at all, because Bach published both recipes and invited anyone to use them.

Why there are two methods

The split follows the calendar and the wood. The sun method needs a flower delicate enough to give itself up to water, and hours of strong, unbroken sunshine, which in England means high summer. Plants like Mimulus, Clematis and the wild Rock Rose qualify.

But much of Bach's final nineteen were trees and woody shrubs that flower early, before the sun has any real strength: Aspen, Elm, Cherry Plum, Willow. For those he devised the boiling method in 1935, reasoning that what the spring sun could not draw out, fire would. Each remedy's own page says which method makes it.

The sun method

Devised in 1930, and unchanged since. The maker picks a cloudless morning and works near the plants themselves, because the water should be local spring water and the flowers should go from stem to bowl within minutes.

A thin glass bowl is filled with spring water. Flower heads are picked at their peak, enough to cover the whole surface, and floated on the water. Then the bowl sits in full sunshine for three hours or so while the maker does something else, which is the part of the recipe most people refuse to believe: the active step is waiting.

The flowers are lifted off with a twig or a leaf rather than fingers, since the water is the whole point and fingerprints are not part of the recipe. What remains is mixed half and half with brandy, and that mixture is the mother tincture.

The boiling method

The 1935 answer for the woody plants. Flowering twigs and leaves are gathered the same way, at their peak on a fine morning, and taken straight to the pot. They are boiled in spring water for half an hour, left to cool, and the liquid is filtered until clear. Half and half with brandy, as before, and there is the mother tincture.

If the sun method is a still life, the boiling method is stock-making, and Bach saw no loss of dignity in that. He wanted the stronger, older material of trees in the system, and a method gentle enough for a daisy was never going to get anything out of an oak twig.

From bowl to bottle to you

The mother tincture is concentrated far beyond use. A couple of drops of it go into a small bottle of brandy to make stock, which is what shops sell: the 20ml dropper bottles on every remedy page here. From stock, you dilute again into a glass of water or a personal mixing bottle, which is where the two drops and four drops of the method come from.

Three dilutions between bowl and tongue is why nobody credible talks about active molecules, and why the honest description of a remedy is a preparation rather than a medicine. What the bottles carry, in Bach's own account, is the pattern of the flower rather than a dose of it. You can take that as poetry or as chemistry's polite silence, and the about page holds our honest thoughts on the difference.

No patents, no secrets

Bach printed the methods in his books and refused to protect any of it, which was of a piece with everything else he did: a system simple enough to use without an expert should be simple enough to make without one. People do make their own, and the recipes above are genuinely the whole procedure.

Most people still buy the bottles, for the same reason most people who could bake still buy bread. The established makers work from the right plants in the right places at the right time of year, the stock bottles last for years, and a well made remedy costs less than the gas money to reach a wild rock rose in flower. But it says something about the system that its entire supply chain could be rebuilt from a paperback, a glass bowl and a sunny morning.

Reading a remedy with new eyes

Once you know the two methods, the remedy pages read a little differently. The groups sort the 38 by feeling, but the making sorts them by season: the sun remedies are high summer's, mostly Bach's early gentle discoveries, and the boiled remedies are the trees and early bloomers of his intense final years. White Chestnut, that most reached-for of remedies, is one of the few late discoveries made in the old sunlit way, floated on water like the first ones were.

If you have not chosen your remedies yet, the quiz starts from how you feel, and the making method will be waiting in the details of whatever you find.