Vigour & Skills - Meet the Maker: Saskia Marjoram

Saskia has been working with flowers at different levels her whole life. As a professional gardener for more than 30 years, and florist to the Prince of Wales for many years, she started making flower essences in 2003 with friend and business partner Christine Felce. After discovering how incredibly effective and simple it was to make and desperately needed them for ourselves and our families.

Flower essences work deeply and gently bringing positive and effective change to our lives. They act as catalysts, bringing awareness and shifting patterns enabling you to move forward in a safe, natural and simple way.

What inspired you to start Saskia's Flower Essences and delve into the world of energetic healing properties?

I have always worked with flowers on a professional and practical level as a florist and gardener, however it wasn't until my life was in crisis when my children were pre-teen that I discovered the magic of flower essences which pretty quickly sorted out our lives. As the process of making them is quite simple, a friend and I thought we'd give it a go - pretty soon we were hooked and soon had too many different essences to carry on giving away, so thought we'd start a business…that was 20 years ago and I am still being constantly amazed at how effective essences are and the changes they can bring.

Being a plant person, essences made sense to me and I love working with their personalities/energy and finding out which each one can help with what (an ongoing process).

Around 9 years ago I discovered distilling and loved the practicality of it. Working with the physical healing properties of plants feels completely different to flower essences but producing my own hydrosols means that I have the perfect vehicle to add essences to for people to use externally which suits a lot of people.

Could you walk us through the steps involved in distilling flowers to create your essences? What equipment and techniques do you use?

So to start with we need to overcome a common misconception… flower essences (similar to the Bach Remedies) aren't made by distillation, but by floating flowers in spring water to collect their energy. However, I do also distill plants to make our range of mists, that I then add flower essences to. It is this distilling process that I am looking forward to sharing at my time at Thyme.

So for distilling plants I use a large copper alembic still which is how essential oils are made as well as hydrosols (for me the more interesting liquid in this process). Plants in the UK don't have to make much essential oil as we don't have loads of sun but they do contain lots of other useful chemicals so when I distil a plant we have the aroma and lots of other healing properties. I then add flower essences to these hydrosols to add extra healing potential.

Making flower essences is a much simpler process and involves floating flowers in spring water in the sunshine to collect their energy and then adding alcohol and diluting down so that our bodies can 'hear' the messages the plants have to teach us.

Are there any specific challenges or obstacles that you encounter during the distillation process? How do you overcome them?

Being a practical person I find it reasonably easy to overcome some of the more common issues that arise when distilling plants. Sometimes it requires thinking outside the box...the biggest difficulty that people find challenging is the cooling process but I have tips for that which I'm happy to share if you get that far with distilling.

Do different flowers require different distillation methods or times to extract their essences effectively? If so, could you provide some examples?

I'm just about to start distilling roses and because steam is much hotter than boiling water, you put these directly in water so they don't get so brutalised. With most other plant material it is best to add a column to your still so that the cell walls are split apart with the heat of the steam.

How do you continue to expand your knowledge and understanding of energetic healing and its connection to nature?

Like lots of things in life, the only way to learn more is just to put the hours in. Getting to know plants is a lot like getting to know a human. Some are easier than others and sometimes it can take decades to feel you properly know someone. If you are interested in something you will pick up information in all sorts of different place -books, conversations, social media posts etc. 

The older I get the more I trust that the information I need will come to me in some form or other and that I don't need to search it out. Working with the essences on a daily basis means that I find the time and space to go deeper and deeper and of course the deeper I go into getting to know plants on all levels, but especially their energetic properties, the more I realise how much there is to know!