Homeopathy For Plants – Yeah, Right!

INTRODUCTION
The tension in the debate aroused by homeopathy is stretched between two relatively
static poles. Around one gather those who have had clear and often dramatic results
and who don’t care that the overwhelming majority of modern scientists consider
homeopathy cannot possibly be effective. The other is home to those who have not
had any such experiences and are thereby confirmed in their conviction that there was
no possible way that homeopathy could work. 25 years ago I realised that I fretted in a
restless grey area between these two islands of calm. I had had a few positive results
after using homeopathic remedies on myself and others, but I could not swear for sure
that these would not have occurred anyway or that the placebo effect was not in some
way responsible for any objective improvement.

All my training reinforced a desire to side with those who were incredulous that any
grown up could believe the homeopaths’ nonsense. My clear-thinking teachers guided
me into and through disciplines which confirmed that homeopathy could not be
effective simply because of how the remedies are made. One need not try such things
in the same way that one need not head-butt a charging bull to know the general
outcome. It was a ‘no brainer’. Was I going to abandon clear and rational thinking and
go over to those who were surely acting on faith alone - and misplaced faith at that?
Had I not heard of the enlightenment? Could one not evaluate the relative merits of
faith’s abuses and power trips and its malleable wisdom based on dogmatic and
nebulous texts, and discriminate between that and scientific knowledge which leaves
one free to embrace what is manifestly effective and also to move on as insights
evolve. Faith brought inherently unresolvable conflict and slovenly thinking. Science
brought clarity both in its method and conceptual tools enabling one to overcome
differences with ones peers in a respectful and peaceful way. What are you going to
chose in this light? OK, just look at the clinical trials, I was told.

Whilst tempted to move that way, making me look over my shoulder and drag my
heels was the sight of all the good people in the other direction. It could not honestly
be said that these were all stupid and/or gullible. These were not all the ‘worried well’
who were unaware of the copious and authoritative literature on the placebo effect.
Indeed there have been hundreds of thousands of people, administering, and
diagnosing and being diagnosed who were convinced they had been propelled
towards wholeness by homeopathy, often after the best efforts of the opposing
‘scientific’ school of healing had been ineffective. Also making me procrastinate over
what seemed a simple decision was the 200 year history of relatively good results and
harmlessness: homeopathy compared very favourably with the early attempts of the
currently orthodox approach, and also seemed free from the occasional calamities of
later attempts – thalidomide etc. Then there were my own experiences with
homeopathy: were they really coincidences or the result of the placebo? There was
also ‘Herrings law of Cure’ the absence of which played its part in winkling me out of
my medical training. Only later did I find that this was an insight of Hahnemann’s
that had been given form by one of the many doctors who came to discredit, and
stayed to learn and practice. But if I asked the convinced how homeopathy could
possibly be effective the answers were not up to scratch. OK, there was Hahnemann’s
‘law of similars’ which I found satisfying: its roots stretched back via Hippocrates and
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

the Vedas into the mists of time and formalised common-sense confidence in the
‘hair-of-the-dog’. But if this was supposed to hold good towards and over the
Avogadro threshold I was very sceptical. OK, just look at the clinical results they too
urged me.

So let’s consider the issues one more time from the no-mans-land between these
factions, and then I’ll tell you what I’ve done to try and bring resolution. First, the
history.

HOMEOPATHY
The German physician, Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843),
was not convinced that what he was trained to do was
helping anybody. He was so disillusioned that he stepped
back from practice and turned his talents to translating
medical texts. A decisive moment occurred when he was
translating Cullen’s materia medica.1 Hahnemann was
interested to see Cullen’s description of a Peruvian tree
whose bark was used by the natives to protect themselves
from malaria. The Peruvian Bark or Chinchona tree might
help malaria sufferers but it was also clear that when the
unafflicted took it they developed symptoms very like
malaria anyway: rounds of intermittent high fevers with
drenching sweats followed by penetrating chills. The
symptoms induced in the healthy were similar to those that were cured in the sick.
Was that a coincidence or was this a specific instance of a general principle? History
shows that Hahnemann considered Peruvian Bark to be his first meeting with a law
which he formalised as similia similibus curentur – usually translated as ‘let like be
cured by like.’ In 1807 he named the discipline based upon this motto, ‘homeopathy’
which could be translated as ‘matching suffering’. This was one of Hahnemann’s
discoveries but, as we have mentioned, this was probably actually a rediscovery.

His second and more relevant discovery does not have an obvious precedent but he
was lead towards it as a corollary of the first. Logically one would want to populate a
homeopathic materia medica with substances that caused symptoms but these already
have a very serviceable name: poisons. Indeed Hahnemann got a lot of his early
information from descriptions of poisonings. Remember the surgeon’s dark humour:
“The operation was a complete success but, unfortunately, the patient died.” It is no
good curing a person by killing them with poison so one must reduce the dose to
something that can be tolerated. Hahnemann did this by taking a certain amount of the
original herb or compound and putting it into solution in alcohol and/or water to make
the ‘mother tincture’. He mixed it up and then took a fraction of this solution and put
that into another bottle, topped it up with fresh water/alcohol and shook (‘succussed’)
it again to create his first potency. This dilution and shaking can be repeated, in theory
at least, ad infinitum and in practice people seem to have given it a pretty good try.
The series of dilutions is regularly hundreds of bottles long, and some substances
have been taken to the millionth potency – a lot of glassware! These incredibly

1
A materia medica is a catalogue of medicinal substances with the illnesses and syndromes that each was thought
to address. (One could say that this role is now, in the UK, taken on by the BNF – the British National Formulary.)

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

diluted remedies are still given to patients and are said to be effective. Whilst
overdosing is certainly addressed, a whole new problem arises.

We can address this by introducing Avogadro, a contemporary of Hahnemann’s,

whose work brought a practical side to an ancient thought-experiment. Democritus (b.
~ 460 BC) wondered whether one could cut a rock indefinitely ie, if the practicalities
of knife sharpness and acuity of eyesight were ignored, could one cut bits of rock for
ever or would one get down to a basic indivisible bit? Democritus was of the opinion
that these fundamental particles or atoms – named after the Greek for not cuttable - do
exist, and that their varying geometrical properties result in the different substances.

Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Bernadette Avogadro di Quaregna e

Cerreto was born twenty-one years after Hahnemann. Avogadro’s
work helped differentiate atoms from molecules. Shortly after his
death his work was recognized, and 40 years later when Josef
Loschmidt estimated the number of these smallest defining units of
substance in a ‘mole’ or gram-molecule (thus enabling chemists to
weigh equivalent reactive amounts of substances of different atomic
mass), this value was named in Avogadro’s honour. If one has a
molar concentration of a substance, say 58.44 grams of sodium
chloride in one litre of water, there will be approximately 6.02214179
x 1023 salt molecules in that litre. Back to Hahnemann…

Let us suppose, for the purposes of illustration, that Hahnemann’s mother tincture of
the major homeopathic remedy natrum muriaticum - as salt was called when Latin
was the language of the formally educated – was molar. (Incidentally this shows that
Hahnemann’s process of potentisation was able to develop a useful remedy picture
from non-toxic materials.) Hahnemann often diluted his mother potencies a hundred-
fold to make the daughter potency so
although his first bottle of mother tincture
would have around 6 x 1023 salt molecules
in it, the second would have only about 6 x
1021 salt molecules, the third bottle 6 x 1019
and so forth. At the 12th bottle, assuming
scrupulous pharmacy protocols, there ought
to be just a handful of salt molecules left.
The 13th will probably not have any of that
salt at all, and the 14th would have only
about a 1:1000 chance of having any of the
original substance left in it. This twelfth
centesimal potency (12C) marks the stage at
which the Hahnemannian process of potentisation becomes fundamentally
incompatible with the orthodox understanding. At the higher concentrations, from the
first bottle or mother tincture to the 12C, the debate is dominated by the evaluation of
clinical results. Beyond this 12C potency the tussle is re-invigorated. Even the
homeopaths agree that there will be none of the original matter left in the remedy
given to the patient. A recent vocal anti-homeopathy group calls itself 1023 to
emphasise how stupid homeopaths must be not to understand the implications. ‘It’s
impossible’ they assert. ‘But it works’ the homeopaths retort. With this stalemate the
entrenched boundary between ‘sound science’ and homeopathy found its location.

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

The two camps are still hurling invective over my wishy-washy head with rare
instances of courteously restrained debate to see if there has been any movement in
the opposition’s stubborn stance.

Although I have only focussed properly on this aspect of the debate over the last
decade, my adult life has not strayed too far from it. I trained as a homeopath after
dropping out of medical school but by the time I finished my training I was designing
and making ecological water treatment systems. However, in the same period around
25 years ago, my interest in water brought me to Flowforms2 and then to biodynamic
agriculture as part of an active search for ecological sanity within our destructive
culture.

HOMEOPATHY FOR PLANTS

Like homeopathy, biodynamic agriculture (BD) uses substances
in infinitesimal quantities, but these are sprayed on soil and
plants or put in compost heaps, and not administered to people
or animals. There are many aspects of BD that are troublesome
to the modern scientific mind. Indeed much of the practices
appear so weird that many people do not get beyond the first
shock. BD growers use the ‘preparations’ after instruction from
Rudolf Steiner in 1924, and his eight agriculture lectures don’t
show enough of his thinking to be self-explanatory. Herbs,
manure and crushed crystals are put into parts of a dead animal
(stag’s bladders, cows horns etc) and buried for a few seasons
before being exhumed and used in minute doses!! Two of these
biodynamic preparations are sprayed over crops after being
stirred in alternating directions for an hour in plenty of water.3

My early exposure to BD was influenced by loving the food and the care brought to
the garden, and by the community that had grown and grown up around the farm and
garden where I first met BD. Although the activities seemed to be like something out
of a pantomime or the ‘new age’, they were undertaken soberly and thoughtfully by
grounded people. I know such things are not pertinent to a scientific evaluation of a
technique but I tell you this because they are some of the biographical reasons that
carried me over the shock to become involved in BD. Added to these social lures was
a hope that if I read and understood these lectures and hung around long enough, I
might find some answers to the enigmas of homeopathy from what I sensed was an
agricultural cousin focused on the health of the natural world. I hoped that these two
eccentric traditions would illuminate each other. Whilst my head was initially
nonplussed, my heart was quickly and increasingly attracted to find out what on earth
was going on.

I was also interested to see that Steiner had given other lectures after being invited by
doctors and medical students to address them about the implications of his general
approach within the healing arts. In these lectures he discussed various homeopathic
2
See, ‘Flowforms, Human Waste, the Universe and Everything’ by the author. ISBN 0-9517890-1-5
3
Some clarity in terminology may be useful. When BD growers stir their field sprays this is called dynamization.
This could also be used as a term for each shaking in the making of homeopathic remedies but this is widely called
succussion so we will stick to that. Potentisation takes a substance up a scale of potencies as already described.

4
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

remedies within a systematized framework. Furthermore, Steiner had guided some of

his contemporaries to potentise various substances in a Hahnemannian way and apply
these to plants. Together, these struck me as being potentially fruitful for addressing
my fundamental questions. Firstly, working with plants would remove the uncertainty
of subjective results such as are thrown up by the placebo effect. Second, it gave the
possibility of multiple replications enabling statistical analysis, free of the procedural
and ethical issues that go along with human and animal testing. Third, if Steiner’s
clues and intimations were right, he was proficient in a systematic approach to the
preparations as opposed to relying on trial and error alone. Homeopathy has its similia
principle but a new substance needs a proving to reveal its uses. (To the chagrin of the
modern objectors it has to be admitted that homoeopathy is, if nothing else, evidence
based!) Just below the surface of biodynamics is the hint that one could observe the
form of, say, a plant and by understanding the metamorphosis4 of its developing form
one could, in theory, have a pretty good idea of its medicinal properties. In short, all
the best bits from the science camp could be brought to bear on the homeopathic-
biodynamic world so that one would not need to ‘believe’ in it. It would be a critical
as opposed to a dogmatic discipline, leaving the practitioners free and creative to
address our urgent ecological issues with non-polluting tools.

THE KOLISKOS: DOES IT WORK?

The results of the co-workers who potentised Steiner’s
biodynamic preparations from the 1920s onwards were published
in a book called ‘Agriculture of Tomorrow’.5 What was
outstanding was the work that Lily Kolisko had done, even if we
just stick to the efforts expended upon what were called the
‘smallest entities’ and ignore the equally phenomenal work on
crystallisation and quality testing. Here was someone who had
developed tests that revealed how potentised preparations affect
germinating plants and seedlings. This enabled relatively quick
feedback – in weeks rather than months. The results were shown
in graphs of plant measurements
plotted against potencies on either
side of the Avogadro threshold. Thousands upon
thousands of experiments with replications and controls
were the fruit of her sustained and focussed activity over
20 years. This priceless treasure is all the more
remarkable because Lily and her husband Eugen were
interrupted by the inconvenience of escaping the Nazi’s
and settling in the UK. Just as WWII was unleashed
between her adopted and native countries and as her
husband died young, Lily wrote her book across the
River Severn from where I am sitting now. She
continued her labours there until her death in 1976.
Respect is due.

4
See JW Geothe, ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants.’ My favourite edition is by Gordon Miller and published by
MIT! ISBN 9780262013093, and ‘Metamorphosis: Evolution in Action’ by Andreas Suchantke. ISBN
9780932776396. Also see later in this paper.
5
ISBN 0906492009. This book is now out of print and second hand copies are rare and expensive. However, it
can be accessed via the Holistic Agriculture Library.

5
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

It seems petty to find fault but the issue relevant to the current subject is that although
the graphs remain, the data from which these graphs were plotted do not. This means
that no one can check whether the results are statistically significant. As far as
resolving the debate between the homeopaths and theoretical scientists her work is
holed beneath the water line. Whilst ‘Agriculture of Tomorrow’ shows that potentised
preparations – even over the Avogadro threshold – affect plants in a regular fashion,
this cannot meet the benchmarks of statistical proof due to lack of evidence. Lily’s
work can be used as part of the peace talks but one should not expect it to be the
definitive piece of evidence.

So I started to do some of my own experiments. The only unambiguous result was

that my admiration for Lily and Eugen’s work multiplied significantly. It is not easy
to do even one test thoroughly and convincingly whilst bringing up a family and
doing ones day job. That Lily did this … wow! I quickly came to the conclusion that I
was not going to be able to nail this issue alone and lapsed, temporarily, into impotent
inactivity.

PEERS: DOES IT WORK?

As I was digesting the pre-war work the
internet began to stumble from geeky
academic beginnings to popular and
simple access. An English-speaking
discussion group formed concerning itself
with biodynamics6 and a few things
dawned on me. The first is probably not
unique to BD but is characteristic of
communication between farmers and
gardeners in general. There seems to be a
great hunger for communication but
spending all God’s hours working in the
fields and gardens amongst Nature’s many
ever-varying factors makes growers reluctant to come to firm conclusions and then to
share them. The stereotype of the heavy-booted taciturn farmer trudging
contemplatively after the cows is not without foundation in my experience. But get a
few of them together at the market and a strange rumbling noise will rise from
beneath the hats into which everyone is listening with great focus. ‘What did you do
for the mastitis? How’s the turnips his year? Did you try that thing you tried last year
again? What happened this time? ...’ The internet is brilliant for such growers. You
can just listen, or occasionally drop in a timid word. You can put forward an
outrageous and essentially anonymous hypothesis with a confidence you do not really
possess in order to try and flush out some thoughts about what is really bothering you
– all in your jimjams once the chores are done for the day. No one need know if you
are stunning or hideous, male or female, smell of fresh hay or old bedding. In some
ways, for many growers, the net is an improved version of leaning on the edge of a
pen at the market and wondering how to admit you are stumped by the many draining
demands of agriculture, all without losing face with your neighbours.

6
Biodynamics Now!

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

So I had found a garrulous community of BD practitioners who shared stories of their

successes and failures. Here was an informal and international nucleus of BD growers
who might conceivably pool energies and amass evidence in relation to the questions
that troubled me. Simultaneously it would be possible to see which of these stories of
success might be useful to anyone else.

CONSIDERA: TWO SLUGGISH DATABASES, ONE ACTIVE

So I took a gamble and my family and business partner supported me in reducing my
other work to concentrate on the questions that homeopathy and biodynamics
stimulate. The fates have been good to us and the money is only just running out now,
almost a decade after making this the primary focus of my working time. What has
emerged from this period are several pertinent publications7 (mainly translated rather
than my own) and a website based around 3 databases8 which can be found at
www.considera.org.

The first database I put together collected

results from planting by the Moon, planets
and stars – the heavenly bodies! What has this
to do with homoeopathy? I hope this will
become clear by the end of this article, but in
the early lectures of his Agriculture course
Steiner suggested a key to this ancient and
once-ubiquitous practice. There has been a lot
of research on this since and the main
researcher in this field is Maria Thun –
another BD heroine. However, her efforts are
not always replicable and when one looks
into planting by the Moon one finds lots of contradictory but firmly-held convictions.
It occurred to me that much of this disagreement might resolve if we didn’t just buy
planting calendars - the results of people’s conclusions - but actually had the ‘raw
data’ from the experiments. If we knew what was done and when and knew the
characteristics (weight, taste etc) of the plants that emerge from all these experiments,
then we could put all these results together and analyse them by computers. Looking
for patterns in stacks of data is a computer’s strength. One researcher may have
concluded that the plants respond to the synodic cycle – full and new Moon phases –
whilst another might find greater yields of roots when the Moon’s arc across the sky
is getting lower night by night, and of viable seed if the Moon’s arc is rising. But if
we had the raw information it is conceivable that we would find that the correlation
was much greater when compared with the activity of, say, Jupiter. This would be a
step towards transparency and bring credibility to the discipline – and it would be
cheap and organic if the world were sufficiently impressed to adopt it. It might even
be used to anticipate future issues, and successful projections based on statistics make
a discipline eligible to be considered a science. Win win win win, I thought.

7
www.moodie.biz
8
A database is a collection of information that can be arranged, searched and extracted in various ways. Cullen’s
materia medica was a good example of such a database although it lacks the flexibility of the modern digital
equivalents.

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

I asked the people who had compiled the digital Swiss Ephemeris if there was a way
to do this ‘reverse astrology’ – one which went from data to heavenly correlations (if
not causes) rather than from star-chart to prediction – and although they thought this
would be possible, no one was then available to do the work. However, they pasted
my query onto their bulletin board and I got an answer the next day from Tallinn from
someone who had been, ‘wondering that morning if plants responded to the
constellations’ or some other segmentation of the starry background to the wandering
stars. What is more, Abhi was already working on reverse-astrology algorithms. If I
was wasting my time the fates seemed to want me to waste it thoroughly. Abhi and I
put the first iteration of the Considera project together. It was quite a buzz.

Around the same time I did a proper experiment with the

assistance of my wife and her dad. We already rented some
land for our community composting scheme. The operation
did not use the whole area so when my ‘in laws’ came to live
near their young grandchildren, Grandad Billy used some of
the compost to grow veg in the same field. (The inflexible and
short-sighted regulations, brought in after the UK’s foot and
mouth and BSE epidemics, closed us down. This is barely
related to the subject in hand except it is the reason there was
so much compost available, but I am still frustrated that a
beautiful thing was crushed as it was coming into its prime.
But I digress…) An eclipse of the Sun was scheduled to occur
on March 29, 2006 at 10 am. So every day at 10am between
March 26 and April Fools day (I kid thee not) we planted two rows of 22 seed-
potatoes in the soil enriched with the compost we were now forbidden to sell. We
sprayed the area with a potentised BD preparation called E19 and stood back. Very
soon it was clear even to a cursory glance that the potatoes grown before and after the
eclipse rows were doing much better than those planted on the 29th. We harvested in
August and the yields from those grown on the 28th and 30th were both one and a half
times greater than those from the 29th. I felt that we were on to something.

However, this part of the project does not seem to have caught the public imagination
so, to some extent, we can call it a failed initiative. The second database had a similar
fate: this involved a simple nudge of the existing software and interface to make it fit
for weed and pest control experiences. Both are still accessible and although there
have been some noticeable results, the servers have never been in danger of crashing
due to the traffic. Hey ho.

9
See http://www.considera.org/materiamedicagricultura.html?remtype=2&rem=80

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

As I settled into the demands of this project and by digging into the coffers again, we
designed a third database. This was intended to address a third defining technique of
BD which is the use of the biodynamic preparations. One of the great examples set by
homeopathy, as a collaborative discipline as opposed to as a scientific enigma, is the
homeopathic materia medica and its accompanying repertory. The homeopathic
materia medica for humans was originally populated by observations of poisonings.
Later the symptoms induced by other barely toxic and even seemingly inert
substances like silica were added through an experimental process known as provings.
Finally, symptoms which were not evoked but which were regularly found to be cured
were added to assist the practitioner to find the right remedy or similimum for the
person who had come for healing. For over 200 years homeopaths from all corners of
the world have collaborated to build up this freely accessible heirloom as a common-
wealth for all practitioners present and future. If this were a software programme it
would be called ‘open source’. It is the Linux process as opposed to the proprietary
OS process which is more analogous to the practices of pharmaceutical businesses.
Everyone contributes to it and everyone gets to use it if they agree not to misuse it. It
was this model that appealed to me and I just needed to take a deep breath and
contemplate creating an appropriate interface.

Again the fates seemed to want to hang me for a sheep

rather than a lamb: the search engines showed that there
was already a format including some data for such a thing,
at least in someone’s private papers. At an international
permaculture gathering Ben Rozendal and Eric O'Gorman
discussed their ‘Similicure’ initiative which had great
results from using homeopathic remedies upon plants. It
took me a lot of Googling before I could find Ben since he
usually works under the name given through his spiritual
tradition. However, I found a blog by a veteran of the 1992
Gulf war who was suffering from his wounds who
described how he had been greatly assisted by a
homeopath who had reduced the scar tissue with the
remedy silicea. The homeopath was the same Mr
Rozendal. After a few emails, a phone call, and a meeting
in Amsterdam we agreed to polish and publish the
youthful materia medica Ben had developed for plants. The book emerged as
‘Homeopathy for Farm and Garden’10, and Ben’s materia medica primed the pump of
the third Considera database – the materia medica agricultura and the repertory
which accompanies it. A materia medica lists each preparation with the symptoms
which it addresses. A repertory lists each symptom and all the preparations which
address that symptom. One could say that they are indexes to eachother. Which you
go to first depends on whether you have symptoms or preparations to consider. We
built the database structure and then the web interface so any English-speaker can add
their own experiences. What is more, whilst Ben used remedies from the homeopathic
pharmacopoeia, we could use the same structure for adding experiences of the BD
preparations and ‘magic potions’ from different traditions and businesses11. I laid
10
Homeopathy For Farm and Garden. VD Kaviraj, ISBN 978-0-9517890-5-6
11
One of the many unforeseen benefits of the work was finding that there are small companies and academic
researchers around the world who have tried potentised materials on plants. See
www.considera.org/hrxclassic.html and the literature survey .

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

down only a few conditions for collaborators. Those who contributed to the database
had to affirm they would ‘do my best’, any preparation had to contain infinitesimal to
zero substance, the reports must be of what had been witnessed personally and were
not hearsay, and the reports had to have an absolute minimum of esoteric or other
jargon in them. Anyone with basically healthy sense organs and reasonable common
sense had to be able to understand what was written or to find definitions in botanical
and horticultural texts. Reports must be clear, pithy, and in English. Commercial
companies agreed to have their own input differentiated from disinterested
contributions, and agree to avoid advertising and disparaging any other products. By
and large people have stuck to these terms.

A final benefit was that one could add information from publications so that authors,
even dead ones, could contribute their experiences. Their input too would be linked to
the author and/or source. All this built up a picture of what indications called for the
application of the various remedies. Digitally competent growers could contribute
directly to the project, whilst those who do not get on with computers – and there are
many – could write up their experiences and employ the postman so I could add them
to the database. The chat over the virtual farm gate could now be gathered into a
useful collection of anecdotes.

ANECDOTE AND EVIDENCE

There’s that word again. The homeopathic tradition greatly values anecdotal evidence
(as do farmers incidentally) whilst the guardians of science are very wary of
something with so little scope for meaningful comparison. The homeopaths say that
each situation is essentially unique so that replications and the use of statistics is not
so straight forward as it is when the goal is to isolate a single variable and test the
impact of a carefully controlled intervention. If we ‘merely’ measure the presence of a
specific pathogen in a blood test as an indication of success we can find what is toxic
to that bloodborne organism and administer it. By the criterion we have set ourselves,
getting rid of the bug is to cure. A homeopath will say that the state of health of the
individual has enabled the ubiquitous pathogen to multiply and become problematic
and whilst killing that pathogen might relieve the symptoms, it has not necessarily
addressed the more fundamental situation that enabled the pathogen to proliferate in
the first place. In order to do that one must not focus on the pathogen so much as on
the host organism – the person – and see how this particular person responds to the
outbreak12. One person may become weepy and crave company, whilst another would
become taciturn and seek solitude yet both have the same organism shown in their
pathology report. A doctor should probably give the same medicine to each, and a
homeopath probably should not. The doctor can rely on the antibiotic that statistics
show has killed these bugs in most people. This statistically supported medicine is
totally justified within the medical paradigm. What is common to the population as a
whole as indicated by the statistics shows the right way for the doctor to proceed.
What is gold to the homeopath is what is unique, what is different from the others

12
One is advised to look up from the parasitic pathogen to the host organism and attempt to regenerate wholeness
there, and even to ‘zoom out’ further to the greater context and remove any maintaining causes there. If one is
drinking contaminated water or has been shot these are the issues and homeopathy’s potential to heal is certainly
not then the first step towards healing. This use of the ‘macroscope’ to complement the use of the ‘microscope’ is
another instance of the approach to the issues addressed towards the end of this article.

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

who have the illness13. This challenge of individualising is partly responsible, in my

opinion, for the fact that the homeopathic prescription is not so regularly ‘effective’ as
an antibiotic. Compounded with the homeopaths’ assertion that their discipline
actually cures and that antibiotics only bring short term symptomatic relief –
sometimes very welcome and appropriate nevertheless – one can begin, at least, to
understand why homeopaths claim to have a more difficult and involved task.

Back to plants. The Considera materia medica agricultura is also very happy to have
anecdotes for these reasons and, frankly, because there is not much more around.
More positively it is a assumption/prejudice of mine, one in which I hope to be
humoured, that farmers and gardeners are best qualified to see what is really
happening in their gardens and farms, and they are not easily excited to make claims.
If they apply a preparation and something clear emerges then let’s share that
information. Time and repetition will edit out erroneous or partial observations and
highlight which are more widely useful. This welcome to the amateur and the lack of
ownership of the information is why I call this ‘democratic research’.

Don’t get me wrong, the materia medica also contains results from well designed
trials containing ‘controls’ undertaken by disinterested professionals, but to restrict
input to those that meet this ‘gold standard’ would not only be discouraging and
disempowering for amateurs, it would defeat another purpose of the project. For the
purposes of this article, the first goal might be to accumulate an overwhelming body
of robust evidence to be plonked, like a petition, on the iconic materialist scientist’s
desk in the hope of being persuasive that potentised substances do work on plants. In
practice this is a rather abstract aim. The more pertinent aim is to assist those who use
potentised preparations to do their work more effectively. It is an internal educational
service in the agrohomeopath’s camp rather than a tool for convincing anyone else.
Biodynamic growers have a ‘big picture’ into which the preparations fit so one would
hope that by thoughtful analysis of the situation in front of them a logical and specific
course of action would be chosen. My experience is that their preparations are
frequently applied by rote in the vague hope that something or other positive will
occur. It is my opinion that the major beneficiaries of the materia medica will be
those who wish to understand the appropriate circumstances for using each specific
preparation and, if this is the case, the materia medica should in turn benefit from
contributing to more successful trials and thus a more convincing and assuring case to
present to the open-minded grower. Either one can spray BD 500 and 501 once and at
some arbitrary point in the season so that the certifying authority is appeased, or one
could see what kind of season one is having and find a balancing spray to bring the
situation towards the favourable situation for the crops. Those who wish to make best
use of the (non-polluting) potential of BD and agrohomeopathy would do well to
observe the scientific process and learn from what is instructive – and in fairness,
there certainly are those that do. Whether the scientists would do well to reciprocate
in some way is another story, so let’s get to that question now: Do the scientists have
something to learn from the homeopaths and in particular from the agrohomeopaths?

13
The SRPs – the strange rare or peculiar responses of the organism - are usually the important clues to the
homeopath. There is an overlap: the homeopath will have ‘specifics’ and the ‘genus epidemicus’ which is
prescribed if the symptoms dominate the picture in all patients. Thus, if there is an epidemic of cholera, the best
remedy’s picture will include the rice-water stools and emaciation and dehydration. That will give a good
indication for what remedy is likely to be effective in most cases. In such situations individualising is not a good
use of time.

11
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

‘PROPER’ EVIDENCE?
Let’s first offer some inducement to even the most fervent homeopath-bater. I
mentioned earlier that the materia medica is not solely populated by ‘mere’
anecdotes. Part of what spurred me to create the third database was that I heard of an
independent and well-respected laboratory that had done some testing in 2002 and
that the agricultural preparation that gave the best result was a potentised BD
preparation. I have written about this elsewhere14 but, in brief, some fruit growers of
North Island New Zealand lost a significant proportion of one year’s crop to frost.
Many fruit trees flower even before the leaves emerge at the start of the season whilst
a majority of annuals germinate, put up leaves and flower only later in the season. So
orchard blossom is particularly vulnerable to
winter weather hanging on into spring. The late
frosts hammered NZ in September-October
2002 so the growers got together to see what
might be done. HortResearch, an independent
and respected laboratory, ran tests on various
sprays because the fruit industry is already set
up for spraying. The spray that enabled most
fruit to grow was Warmth Spray - now called
ThermoMax15. This spray contains three BD
preparations that have had homoeopathic-style
potentisation to focus their effect. This is not
yet the full gold-standard of evidence because there were not enough replications to
make this test statistically significant. However, ThermoMax has sold increasingly
well ever since and not just to those already convinced about BD. Commercial
orchards that use chemicals also use this stuff because it does what it says on the tin.
Businesses pay good money year after year to protect their crops from late frosts over
thousands of hectares using ThermoMax. The maker of this preparation, Glen
Atkinson, is most thoughtful in his procedures. He has also blended the BD
preparations at different potencies to achieve other aims: increasing photosynthesis in
dull seasons, stopping fruit from splitting in the maturation phase but still enabling the
sugars and the dry matter to increase, reducing bird damage on fruit, and reducing
smells and crop-burn from slurry - and more. Some of the confidence to assert this
comes from experienced growers who are willing to pay, and some from professional
laboratories who do nothing else but evaluate what ‘plant protection products’
actually achieve. These tests are not cheap to run and for a young industry of self-
employed researchers/entrepreneurs rather than multinationals or university
departments these are serious barriers to providing more of such ‘gold-standard’ data.

However, a major spur to write this piece now (November 2010) is that there has been
a recent result that seems to meet the gold-standard for impartial expert-run
experiment-based evidence which should, therefore, be of interest to all scientists no
matter what their initial inclination. Pakistan has a predominantly agricultural
economy based around wheat and cotton. In the growing seasons of 2008 and 2009 a
homeopathic preparation, way way beyond the Avogadro threshold16, was tested by a
14
http://www.moodie.biz/thinking/PotenciesAndScience.pdf
15
See ThermoMax's entry in the materia medica
16
Various substances are in the preparation between 200C and 500C. The preparation is now able to make claims
on its labels and is called Ventage. I am very interested to see how it does on the market place. For more see
http://www.considera.org/Iftikhar.html

12
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

coalition of the testing houses, research authorities and government regulators on

various strains of cotton to see if there was any impact on mealy bug infestations. The
potentised candidate was tested at the same time as the standard neonicotinoid called
thiomethoxam and a water control. The results were given as a percentage reduction
of nymph and adult mealy bugs compared to the control at 72 hours and one week
after a single application. In 2008 the neonicotinoid gave reductions of 99% and 90%
(adult then nymph) after 72 hours. A week after the spray results were both 99%. The
homeopathic preparation gave results of 98 and 98% at 72 hours and after a week the
results was 100% for the adults and 99% for the nymphs. In 2009 the chemical gave
72-hour results of 98 and 93 percent and 97 and 99% after a week. The equivalent
reductions from the homeopathic preparation were 86 and 89%, and 95 and 98% 4
days later.

Perhaps, after all these words, we should pause

to emphasise this: a preparation that has been
diluted out of conceptual and measurable
existence has been shown to be highly
effective on organisms that should not be
susceptible to the placebo effect, and this
research has been conducted by the experts
and regulators in field-trials over two
consecutive seasons. If all is as it appears to
be, and I have no reason to suggest otherwise,
this is relevant to my struggle and - I would
hope - far and wide beyond. As well as being a
leading candidate for ‘proof of concept’ for agrohomeopathy and perhaps, by
extension, to biodynamics, should this not stimulate researchers all over the world to
look into the possibility that the way towards cheap and non-toxic agricultural
interventions was actually right there in the camp their education taught them to
ignore? This report is a world-moment if it is what it appears to be.

The sense of security upon which the scientists found their scepticism of homeopathy
is like a stool with three legs. The first is made of rational scientific reasoning and the
second is forged from a perceived lack of permissible evidence. The last is
constructed from an alloy of instinct, common sense and prejudice in proportions
determined by the individual concerned. I would suggest that this should at least make
them stand up and check that the ‘evidence’ leg is secure beneath them. All may be
well but will they not be stimulated to check? Is it not due diligence in their field of
expertise? Indeed let us now see if we cannot induce them to reassess the soundness
of the leg of reason while they are up.

HOW CAN HOMEOPATHY WORK?

Of the three questions that normally arise when homeopathy is discussed – what is it,
does it work, and how the hell does it work??? – the first two have now been
addressed. What about that last one? Actually, the question of how the preparations
can possibly work is potentially the most interesting for me, though I do not expect
everyone to share my enthusiasm. Those who are convinced either way don’t seem to
feel the need for any explanation. But for those like myself it is a central question
both for the credibility of the whole concept and for the development of the discipline.

13
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

Upon it depends the potential for rapprochement between the camps and thus the
possibility of concerted effort, proper budgets and peer scrutiny with the goal of an
effective and non-toxic agriculture. But a fuller conceptual appreciation also brings
with it the possibility of bringing excellence to every facet of manufacture, quality
control, diagnosis, and application of the products. It should contribute to recognition
of what other approaches to agriculture are compatible and which are inherently
obstructive. With such possible prizes I think it deserves our best efforts to remove
this last and most obstinate stumbling block to acceptance, and we can approach this
by listening to the clear thinkers amongst those who oppose homeopathy.

Trawling through YouTube, one can find champions of our culture like Dr Jonathan
Miller saying things like (paraphrase): “If homeopaths are right everything we ever
thought we knew is wrong”. Richard Dawkins, paraphrased again, said: “Until
homeopaths show me the new law of physics they have discovered I will not waste
more energy on the debate.” Neither are as funny as Mitchell and Webb or Tim
Minchin, but they are both admirably blunt and pithy and I do not doubt their
sincerity ( – an evaluation which I find more difficult to extend to James Randi).

Their thoughts define a clear target: can one offer a hypothesis for peer consideration
that can be understood (we wish to be rational and systematic), is plausible (we need
to avoid wearing out any welcome we might receive with outlandish speculation) and
is testable (it should not be a sterile dogma)? The hypothesis would address the
concerns expressed by Miller and Dawkins and those for whom they are de facto
spokesmen, and it should be based on a viable and consistent epistemology
(paradigm). It must avoid postulating an interfering but transcendent reality. Ideally it
should not only throw light on potentisation but on other modern enigmas, and not
contradict the well-considered laws of the existing scientific orthodoxy.

Well, call me an arrogant dilettante, but I think we can give this a reasonable shot.
There are several routes in to this but I will try and take one which leads from where
the physicist is confident and move out into new territory bit by bit. Those with the
credentials and good will to consider this properly are then invited to judge for
themselves whether it is a contender to throw genuine light on all we have discussed
so far. I do not pretend to speak for anyone but myself although almost everything
below comes from ideas I have absorbed from others. No doubt I have misunderstood
or will poorly communicate things in part if not in some essential aspect, and some
penetrating questions would have to be passed on to others more on top of their brief
than I. Having said this let’s try unscrewing the inscrutable with little further ado.

PHYSICS AND SPACE

If I have paraphrased Richard Dawkins sufficiently accurately above, he seems to
hold a widely prevalent assumption. It is clear that he is of the opinion that all
explanations of life’s enigmas must come down to physics to be properly and,
therefore, scientifically explained. Physics is the fundamental discipline of our
modern scientific culture. Even those in the life sciences will receive the support of
their academic peers if they can show the physical basis of their hypotheses and
research. Life is a tricky phenomenon for science to pinpoint (even though it is clear
to every toddler what it is). But for the orthodox elucidation of life, organisms need to
be explicable in terms of biochemical pathways and cascades which are themselves

14
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

transparent to a scientist when they have been elucidated in terms of their

fundamental particles and thus in terms of physics. Life is considered to be a special
case of chemistry, and chemistry a special case of physics. The fundamental particles
themselves have receded from our naive grasp over time starting from rocks to
Democritus’ geometric atoms, via coloured balls on Watson and Crick’s spiralling
straws to counter-intuitive mathematically-modelled abstractions. From the
enlightenment onwards, in the slipstream of Descartes, Bacon and Kant and in our
flight from the manifestly unsatisfactory dogmas of the clergy, we have looked for the
ultimate reality in which we are embraced by looking into ever smaller aspects of the
world around us. It was appropriate, in my opinion, to reject anything based solely on
authority and to demand of our fellows that each step in progress should be communal
and open to each other’s scrutiny. It was
certainly valid to start by forging agreement on
the most basic aspects of reality and to be
incredibly cautious with any subjective
impressions that cannot be shown to have an
objective basis by weighing and measuring.
Inanimate matter was the first aspect of the world
to become transparent to this path of
investigation. The three legs of maths, matter and
measuring provided the secure basis for physics
to start rolling back the enigmas that occur to
every thinking person who tries to make sense of
the world.

Is it right that physics should be the fundamental discipline? Physics seems to be

incredibly successful at revealing what determines inanimate objects within space and
time, but I think physics has two Achilles heels. The first arises from its evident and
stunning success with matter. Our culture’s understandable satisfaction with this work
means that physics has, however unconsciously, been charged with revealing the laws
of living things without appropriately adjusting its focus to accommodate the
differences between mechanisms and organisms. Without this adjustment I suspect
that researcher will be like one condemned to rummage for ever in the knickers-draw
whilst looking for socks. The second Achilles heel is that physics has rarely
considered three-dimensional space sufficiently rigorously. Let us address the latter in
the hope of shedding some light on the former.

What is a straight line? We can follow Euclid and presume that the 4th definition in
book 1 of his ‘Elements’ means that a straight line can be defined as the shortest
distance between two points. Any other trip between those two points would be
longer. But we should not overlook an equally good definition which is that a straight
line is where two planes intersect – consider where a wall meets the floor. Another
example moves us towards the issue I wish to address: any three points that are not all
on a single line define a plane – think of the three points on the end of one of the three
legged stools we have mentioned - but three planes that do not all share a line of
intersection (as would three pages of a book) define a point – such as where two walls
meet the floor in the corner.

15
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

These are simple illustrations of something that

geometricians have known for centuries and have
called the principle of duality. It could be
encapsulated by saying that although any form in
three dimensional space can be defined in terms of
its points, it can be defined by planes with equal
exactitude. The principle of duality lay around as a
geometrician’s plaything for a while since it was
not clear how to make much use of the insight, but
the implications have begun to reveal themselves.
For present purposes I would like to suggest that
our scientific and technological culture has based itself upon only one of these modes
of appreciating space. Following Democritus we have based the explanation of our
reality upon points. We have sought for and found atoms, centres of gravity, electrical
and magnetic poles, etc. These are the realities we acknowledge and which we assume
to be the fundamental realities of everything else including life-forms or organisms. A
certain robust common sense takes us this way, but I hope that you are willing to
entertain the idea that it is at least conceivable that one could just as well look for
causes in planes – in the space in which the fundamental entities are planes and which
has been called ‘polar Euclidian space’ or, more often, ‘counterspace’. In Euclidian
space forces are calculated as originating from centres and dissipating themselves in
all directions towards the infinitely far spaces. In counterspace the origin of forces is
the infinitely distant plane and these forces work in towards centres that are also
unreachable and that we can call infinitudes. 17, 18

For those infected with maths anxiety from school days I suspect this seems like
another sleight of hand to distract us from the bleeding obvious and even if we did
wrap our heads around this it would not lead us to anything of practical use. I would
have been tempted to agree were there not a fair amount of really interesting and
relevant work that reckons with this counterspace as well as the space we are used to.
For the details and technical elucidation I would have to point you to the relevant
literature but there has been great work in the life sciences19 and even in the realm
dominated by physics20. Nick Thomas has developed his recent work from asking
himself what would happen if there were a transformation of a form considered in
both space and counterspace21. Such a ‘linked’ object can be twisted, moved, shrunk,
squeezed and stretched but some of these transformations will be problematic to
accommodate in space and counterspace simultaneously. By first postulating that this
17
The experiment with the potatoes over the eclipse week in 2006 shows, I believe, that the ubiquitous cultural
practice of considering astronomical alignments when planning agricultural activities may not have been so
primitive after all. I suspect this is an instance from traditions that reckoned with the peripheral forces. If the
preparations give us access to the same forces, we are rescued from being tied to calendars whilst still reckoning
with the importance of the peripheral forces to the living world. A fruitful consideration?
18
The infinitely distant plane may seem like an abstraction but perhaps only in the same way as a point. A point is
a location or coordinate without extension: the centre of gravity of an irregular object like a chair will, as like as
not, coincide with no physical point on that chair but it is critical to working out how that chair will behave. The
infinitely distant plane has extension but no position that we can locate with coordinates. These two - point and
plane - are dual in so many ways.
19
For instance, Olive Whicher: ‘Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Space and Time’ ISBN 0854405607,
and George Adams and Olive Whicher: ‘The Plant Between Sun and Earth’, ISBN 0877732329
20
A mathematically substantiated version is ‘Science Between Space and Counterspace’ by Nick Thomas, ISBN
9781902636023, An updated and less technical version is ‘Space and Counterspace’ ISBN 9780863156700.
21
http://www.nct.anth.org.uk/counter.htm

16
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

is analogous to stress and the responding strain

in one spatial mode or the other, we can then
derive all sorts of laws such as have already
been determined by considering Euclidian
space alone. The equation for gravity pops out
of the geometry as does Boyle’s law for gasses
and so forth. This gives my inner scientist
confidence that such an approach is not without the potential for usefulness. That it
also gives a way to understand some of the enigmas of quantum physics, such as
single photon experiments, makes me think that it might really be a productive way of
considering things.

All well and good but does it shed any light on potentisation? I think it might. When a
remedy is shaken or stirred how does the body of water move internally? Clearly it
does not move en masse like a solid object would. The water churns up but can we
characterise this further? One way to observe this would be to take a clear-sided
vessel and stir the water in it into a vortex.22 As you remove the stirring stick let a
drop of ink fall into the water from just above the spinning upper surface and observe
it from the side and top23. You will see dancing inner veils or surfaces of the moving
water body revealed. In an ideal imagination
the water would move like when you bend a
paperback book with the pages shearing over
eachother. One can calculate that if just one
litre of water were moving in such a vortex
there would be a sheath of molecule-thick
surfaces with a combined area of thousands of
hectares.

I postulate that this makes the water receptive to the forces in counterspace which are
also planar by nature. In the process of potentisation the water is encouraged to
resonate with and become sensitive to the planar aspects of the world. As the
preparation is diluted the point-wise aspects of the original substance are gradually
removed whilst the planar aspects of the substance are retained and enhanced. The
removal of substance, far from being the problem, is the whole point of making a
potentised preparation because the planar forces are no longer restrained and
encumbered by the point-wise matter with which they are bound up in the original
‘active ingredient’.

The serial dilution and shaking which defines potentisation does the opposite to what
is done in standard pharmacological practice. In the latter discipline a substance from
nature is increasingly removed from its planar contexts and the material or point-wise
aspects are all that is retained. Even substances of plant origin are driven towards the
mineral. In physics the methods for investigating smaller and smaller particles
requires conditions in which life is less and less able to flourish. It starts with gross
dissection and goes from prepared microscope slides to increasingly inhospitable
environments to enable the dissection to continue. In the ultimate instance the
particles are moving beyond any speed that an organism can endure within massive

22
Theodor Schwenk. ‘Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air.’
23
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Jc-qD4y_bU

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

electrical and magnetic fields and are bashed into each other. One is removing every
trace of life in order to consider how the basis of life comes about. I have found it
useful to take time to extract more implications from this thought.

If we approach this dynamic from another side we could do worse that to follow the
thinking of Henri Bortoft who guides the reader to distinguish between totalities and
wholeness24. All the words of the sentence you are reading right now can be
considered to be the only components of that sentence. If we collect those words
together in a pile we have the totality of what makes up that sentence. However, each
word actually receives its meaning from each of the others, from their relative
arrangement, and from the wider context in which they were found. Only when
considered together and in context does its meaning emerge. Perhaps this is even
clearer when considering music. A middle C can be part of a raging passionate solo
just as well as a melancholy and sustained background chord. The context of the
individual details is often more important than the
exact but sterile details themselves. The analogy I
would like you to consider is with our investigations of
nature. By treating nature as an assemblage of material
parts we lose meaning and we lose the higher function
that can manifest within these parts. We lose Natura.
The collection of parts is, in a limited sense, the totality
of nature, but it is impoverished and meaningless. It is
certainly not the wholeness. This is not a trivial
philosophical nicety but, when appreciated in the round
and in such contexts as a one-sided appreciation of
space, it is potentially a spur to take extra efforts to
avoid reducing Humpty Dumpty to ever smaller parts.
We cannot always recapture the purpose, the life,
identity and meaning, no matter how seamlessly the
parts appear to be reassembled.

PLANTS AND SPACE

Any glimpse into this more comprehensive approach to life would be incomplete
without acknowledging its debt to a playwright and poet! Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749 – 1832), another contemporary of Avogadro and Hahnemann, actually
thought that his scientific work would be of more lasting value than his Faust or The
Sorrows of Young Werther. To acknowledge this debt fully we must indicate another
point of access into the manifestation of life between the two modes of viewing the
space into which plants grow. This approach could be a chance for those allergic to
geometrical thinking to become involved, since the method is founded upon the
observation of growing plants.

After his ‘sturm und drang’ period, Goethe became a pillar of society working to run
a patron’s estate and mines. At one point he badly felt the need for ‘some space’ so,
without telling his friends, he took off. He kept a journal of his ‘flight to Italy’ and it
is in this that we get early glimpses into his way of understanding plants25.

24
Henri Bortoft, “The Wholeness of Nature. Goethe’s Way of Science” ISBN 0863152384
25
Goethe: The Flight to Italy. Diary and Selected Letters ISBN 0192838865

18
 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

Although aware of the Linnean approach which is still

found in today’s field guides – white flower, 4 petals,
pinnate leaves etc etc – Goethe was more impressed by
what he later published as the, ‘Metamorphosis of
Plants.’ In this brief book he outlined three metamorphic
sequences. The first occurs in a single plant and involves
the change in the form of the leaves from the first to
appear at the base of the annual plant and following their
form as the subsequent leaves emerge from the stalk until
they stop growing at the flowering stage. These leaves
can be removed from the plant and laid out in a row in
the sequence in which they emerged. It is more obvious
in some annuals than in others but one can follow a
progression in the size and form of the leaves which is
clearly not random. The larger rounder basal leaves are gradually replaced by more
indented and smaller leaves that can sometimes even be seen to morph into the calyx.
Clearly the individual physical leaves do not change after their growth process (a
most interesting metamorphosis in itself which was later outlined by Jochen
Bockemühl26) but the sequence of leaves shows a lawful progression. The second
metamorphosis became clear to Goethe as he left Germany and travelled across the
alps and down to the North Italian coast. In this journey he could observe the many
indigenous specimens of a single plant species - the dandelions for instance - and
notice the gradually changing impact of
differing climatic conditions as the inland
continental biome gradually became alpine and
then coastal. In the low warmer and wetter sites
the basal leaves were emphasised whereas the
alpine versions either totally bypassed this
stage or acknowledged this only briefly before
producing the leaves normally only appearing
towards the calyx in the valley plants.

In both instances one has to keep ones observations exact whilst giving oneself
permission to look beyond what is physically present and concentrate on the
progressions – second nature to an artist. Goethe realised that one must think in ones
perceptions and perceive in ones thinking.27 One can ask oneself what theme
undergoes these progressive variations. What protean leaf blueprint precipitates
rhythmically into space to make the progression of physical leaves. In a same way one
can ask what protean dandelion is sculpted into the individual specimens in the

26
This single-leaf metamorphosis is probably best covered in Suchantke’s ‘Metamorphosis’ – see footnote 28 –
but I will acknowledge Bockemuhl’s contribution via the book most relevant to the range of issues covered in this
essay, ie ‘Extraordinary Plant Qualities for Biodynamics’ Jochen Bockemühl and Kari Järvinen ISBN 0863155766
27
Not allowing oneself to go beyond observation is an ideal of the scientific method to avoid subjective pollution.
Goethe proposed that thinking and observation must be the twin poles of investigation between which the
investigator of Nature must move, making sure that our inner world does not squash our objectivity but is given its
appropriate place. Such ‘contemplative beholding’ is central to Goethe’s approach. The danger is creating a
transcendent archetype that cannot be shown to exist. This debate about Goethe’s archetypal plant began between
Goethe and Schiller and continues to this day. Rudolf Steiner took some years to edit Goethe’s scientific works,
but broke off from his labours to address the epistemological issues that emerge. He wrote about such issues as the
‘objective idealism’ Goethe uses in his plant work. His books ‘Truth and Science’, ‘A philosophy of Freedom’,
‘Goethe the Scientist’ and ‘A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World View’ are recommended – all
available on line via http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

various conditions and what laws does it obey. And finally one can legitimately ask
what protean or archetypal plant manifests in the various species – the last arena of
metamorphosis to which Goethe addressed himself. If such a thing did not exist, he
argued, how could we know that all these species are all plants? Goethe wished to
develop his ideas into an enlarged edition with full illustrations but time was not on
his side. Others have taken this taken on themselves in the meantime and as I
mentioned before the MIT edition and Andreas Suchantke’s book are wonderful.28

The process that Goethe used to come to this conclusion is

actually just a start. Nigel Hoffman called this ‘water
cognition’ to distinguish it from the Earthy sense-bound
approach to which modern science would limit its
researchers.29 These other modes of investigation can also
be approached through drawing30. Goethe thought he only
really knew a plant when he could draw it from memory. I
wonder if it would now be possible to create an animation
package based on ‘Sim’31 principles to emulate the
metamorphoses before ones eyes. Goethe might approve of
such a crutch but I suspect he would ask us to run the movie
in our mind’s eye first to get the full benefit.

GEOMETRY MEETS GOETHE

The two strands we have teased out using geometry and
field observation, were ravelled together and back into
Nature again by George Adams. Although he is more
easily categorised as a geometrician his presentations
and writing are really beautiful and constantly draw
away from abstractions and back to the living world. He
felt that the polarity of Euclidian space and counterspace
defined the full space into which plants grew so much
better than the Euclidian space alone, but he wanted to
make this idea apparent or transparent to his
observation. Where could one find examples of this in
ones daily experience? The illusive answer to this was,
as it so often appears in retrospect, also obvious. It was
in the details of the growth of plants, at the meristem,
the place of cell reproduction and growth. At the buds
and the heliotropic growth points of the plant kingdom one can watch this before ones
eyes. Cut a red cabbage open along its axis and notice that the older leaves are always
pushed outwards by the new ones which emerge from the central cone within this
protective chalice. This is where life emerges into space. This is where the processes

28
See JW Geothe, ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants.’ ISBN 9780262013093. ‘Metamorphosis: Evolution in Action’
by Andreas Suchantke. ISBN 9780932776396
29
‘Goethe’s Science of Living Form: The Artistic Stages’ Nigel Hoffman. ISBN0932776353. This watery method
can also be developed to an airey method and a fiery method.
30
New Eye’s for Plants: A Workbook for Observing and Drawing Plants,’ by Margaret Colquhoun and Axel
Ewald ISBN186989085X
31
These are a series of computer games in which one can morph faces and other things by moving various sliders
along a scale to emphasise various features.

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

of life move ‘from being to manifestation’. The start of this process of manifestation
occurs in the planar leaves. As these tissues dry and harden they increasingly become
citizens of Euclidian space until they go the way of all matter in the inevitable slide
towards gravity and entropy. In the book he and Olive Whicher wrote called ‘The
Plant Between Sun and Earth’, this is described with a mathematicians precision and a
poet’s eye. The processes and the forms of Nature become transparent to this
combination32.

However, for the purposes of this discussion, in

relation to potentisation and plants, I would urge
readers to another essay which was developed from
his own lecture notes. ‘Potentisation and the
Peripheral Forces of Nature’ was presented to the
British Homeopathic Congress in London on June
1st 1961.33 Many of the ideas in the discussion you
have just read are outlined there with great
eloquence.

CONCLUSION
So my hypothesis is that geometry is more fundamental than physics because it
defines the arena in which the laws of physics apply. Our scientific culture has
focussed on only one way to consider 3D space and so what physics has revealed is
not so much wrong, Dr Miller, but is completed and viewed in the round. ‘Everything
we thought we knew’, if it is indeed one-sided, could be more dangerous than
something that is clearly wrong if we press ahead so confidently with this as our
basis! Just as the one way of considering our world has lead to a technology which is
appropriate to the non-living matter that inhabits Euclidian space, so can we develop
techniques and activities which are appropriate to living beings and are true to a fuller
conception of our world. When we augment our understanding of space we find a
bunch of laws that are appropriate to organisms. The vortices created in the process of
potentisation open up water to the 2D or planar forces which have their origins in the
periphery. By alternating dilution with opening up the water to these centripetal
influences we remove the material whilst retaining the peripheral forces of that first
‘active substance’. The fact that there is none of the original substance is actually the
point and not the problem with potentised preparations and remedies. These
peripheral forces are healing even on plants when these forces have been blocked or
are absent for some reason. Plants are inherently planar beings in their purely
vegetative phases and this is shown most clearly in the dicotyledons’ meristem, in the
enclosed growth centres of the developing leaves. This process can be traced with
precision both scientifically and artistically. Goethe, said Steiner, is the Copernicus
and Kepler of the organic world.

_______

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A student of George Adams, Lawrence Edwards, took this in hand and worked to see if Nature was a
meticulous follower of the forms that geometry would predict from considering space and counterspace. She is!
Read his publication ‘The Vortex of Life: Nature's Patterns in Space and Time’ ISBN 978-0863155512 or have a
look at the work of Graham Calderwood, Lawrence’s pupil, at – www.budworkshop.co.uk
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Available with other essays in ‘George Adams: Interpreter of Rudolf Steiner’ ISBN 0904822087

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 Homeopathy for Plants – Yeah Right

So, I have asked you to follow some pretty unwieldy ideas and I suspect more
questions will have arisen than have been answered. However I hope that these ideas
are sufficiently attractive to induce further scrutiny. If these ideas are viable, they will
only blossom if those of us who really want to understand them, to realise them, look
into them further, both to clarify them and reveal more of their practical
reverberations. The latter, the ecological implications, are particularly dear to me so
let me labour them one last time.

If the route we have taken has been across real territory and not ‘up the garden path’,
then we have benefited from both the homeopaths’ experiences and the scientists’
approach. Having worked on this basis we have found a path to a missing part of what
organisms need - and not just the ‘worried-well’ middle-class organisms. At a time
when we have lavished all our attention on the inanimate world and made ourselves
expert in the laws of what is dead, it is also clear that the living world is suffering
under the twin blows of not receiving the inputs it really needs as well as being forced
to endure inputs which have blocked out many of the naturally available peripheral
forces. Talk of insult and injury … If all of this
is right, or near enough right, then what the
living world needs is for us to put down our
iPads (or at least build a Goethean app) long
enough go out to the fields to understand
Nature with our new eyes and then to bring her
the forces she needs to continue her willing
sacrifice. If the Considera work has a place
within this recalibration of recent times I would
be very happy indeed. If I am wrong, please
accept my apologies, and my thanks for
reading so much.

Mark Moodie
mark@considera.org
November 2010

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