Jane was joint owner of the flower essence company Creature Comforters®, a highly respected Practitioner for people and animals and a wonderful mum, nanny and friend. This tribute cannot be anything but personal, as Jane and I were soul mates, but I feel I speak for so many who knew her when I now talk a little about her life and a lot about who she was.

Jane’s journey to flower essences came from a lifelong interest in complementary medicine. She had a wealth of knowledge in alternative therapies, from homeopathy to herbalism, colour healing to reiki. She was skilled and knowledgeable in all of these areas but it wasn’t until discovering flower essences that she found her true calling. Jane decided that she wanted to dedicate her life to them, and so she did.
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Jane went on to study essences in the early 1980s; she became a Practitioner and spent the next forty years, every day, working in this field. In the late 1980s she joined a new flower essence company where her main specialty was making Mother Essences. I have many happy memories from that time, of driving Jane to remedy-making locations all around the country. The love, care and dedication imbued in those Mother essences that Jane made is very precious. In many ways they are her legacy. She asked me to design the labels, packaging and leaflets for the company; as a friend I wanted to do all I could to help in their success. During this period Jane also helped to develop essence blends, make all thirty-eight Mother essences as Kosher and gain contracts in the UK and US. She also wrote about the essences, assisted in teaching, made other ranges using the ‘living method’, including Bluebell and Chamomile, and she helped to create blends for animals. Jane was an animal lover and had seen the remarkable restorative effects of using Rescue RemedyTM on an injured robin. She said the experience was “like an epiphany.” This inspired her to also specialise as a Practitioner for animals.

The year 2004 heralded a new beginning for Jane as, with my help, she was now running her own fledgling company Sun Essences for Animals. However, her elderly mother needed caring-for and so, Jane being Jane, without hesitation she dropped everything and moved to Cornwall to look after her for the next five years. I stayed in Cromer, Norfolk and offered to run the company whilst she was away. During this period we renamed ourselves Creature Comforters®. Gradually the business flourished and expanded to the point where we now employ a small team supplying authentic Bach Flower Essences, posters, cards and blends for animals, worldwide. 

In 2016 we helped to unveil a blue plaque to Dr Bach at his former home in Cromer Norfolk, where he lived in the 1930s. This was a long-held wish of Jane’s – for Dr Bach to be recognised in this way, here in Cromer.

Jane greatly admired Dr Bach and firmly believed in his ethos and approach when it came to flower essences – that they should be for everyone. There should be no barriers, no hierarchy, no complication. Just pure, simple accessibility and inclusion for all. This inclusion extended to animals, of course, and so we developed and grew our popular Pet Blends® range. One of the things which delighted both of us, a couple of years before Jane died, was when we heard back positive reports from an elephant sanctuary where our donated blends had been of great help the traumatised elephants there. Jane said, “This has made my year!” Her dream was to visit that sanctuary, but sadly she died too soon. My sister, Jess, plans to visit, in her honour, and hopes to tell them all about Jane. ​

Jess made it to that elephant sanctuary for Jane, in 2023, with Hoshi (assistant manager Creature Comforters)

Jane was Naturally Gifted 

Jane was very in touch with the elements and her senses, and had a mild form of synaesthesia, especially with colour, as she would feel a physical response to visual tones. This inspired her to create flower essence blends and fragranced sprays with a focus on the colour of the flowers within. Jane felt that this would form an important element to the healing properties of the blends.
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Jane adored singing, her local choir ‘Sing for Joy!’ was practically her religion, and she loved dancing, partying and all types of music, especially Jazz. Jane was herself a guitarist and a great blues pianist. She also had a remarkable gift as a dowser and used this skill as an aid in her Practitioner work and as a support in her personal life to dowse the answers to quandaries as mundane as, “Where have I left my hairbrush?” or as important as, “Is there any Scleranthus in this huge field?!”
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Over many years in this work Jane became highly respected and the ‘person to go to’ for a Personalised Blend. She gained hundreds of positive and thankful testimonials from happy people and pet owners worldwide. For as long as I can remember people would phone her up, it felt like every other day, and ask, “Jane, can you dowse something for me?” Nothing was ever too much trouble for Jane.
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She had a deep affinity with Mother Nature and always said that she would have been happy living in a tent in the middle of nowhere or by the sea. If she could sleep in the garden just in a sleeping bag under the stars then she would, and she did!
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Jane was outgoing and sociable but didn’t put herself forward within the flower essence community or organisations because, despite her abilities, she didn’t have the self-confidence and always felt she was a Larch or Clematis personality type. Instead, she quietly got on with spreading the goodness of the essences and healing to anyone she could, anyone in need, for forty years and more.
I have always felt that Jane’s respectful and humble approach was a true and fitting way to honour Bach’s legacy. Whether as a Practitioner or in the way she helped me to run our company, she truly embodied Bach’s ethos in this way.​

Her care came without conditions, as did her love

Throughout her life she was there for everyone, everyone’s ‘aunty Jane’. She had a reassuring “everything will be ok” attitude to life, which drew people towards her. Since she passed away I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve said, ”Jane was my best friend.” She would go way over and above for others, always strong, principled, caring and kind. She would not tolerate injustice and would stand tall and defend anyone against it. Jane was always there to lend a shoulder to cry on, day or night, with warm wise words over a cup of tea (containing a few drops of Rescue Remedy of course!). Her care came without conditions, as did her love. There are few people in the world about whom one could say that, but Jane was genuinely one.
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Jane’s packed funeral and the heartfelt tributes paid to her are testament to the positive impact she had on so many throughout her life. Everyone felt a deep and profound sense of loss at Jane’s passing. We had all lost our rock.
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I could wax lyrical with all the positive words under the sun about Jane but I know she would be looking down, laughing, cringing and saying, “That’s enough about me, stop!”, because Jane was a humble person, embarrassed at any praise. I always thought Jane deserved more recognition but she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in accolades or praise because she didn’t have a trace of ego. Jane was spiritual yet down to earth and didn’t take herself too seriously. She had a dry sense of humour, a fabulous sense of fun and was young at heart – we both used to laugh that we never really felt like proper grown-ups! All Jane was interested in was positivity and helping others. That’s what drove her throughout her life from when she was a little girl in Cornwall, helping her district nurse mum, seeking out people and animals in need and whomever she could help.

In Jane’s final days, as she bravely suffered the cancer without ever a word of complaint, one evening as I was helping her settle she asked in anguish: “Ali, what good have I done with my life?” Gosh, where to even start. It was heart-breaking for her to even think to ask such a thing, to even question for a moment the positive impact she’d had on the world – an impact that was clear to see for everyone who was blessed to know her.

“One of the things that makes me happiest is the thousands of people and animals that we have helped around the world with our flower essences. That really makes me happy.”

​The following morning it was obvious that she had been agonising over this all night. But she had found some solace, as she said, “One of the things that makes me happiest is the thousands of people and animals that we have helped around the world with our flower essences. That really makes me happy.” Jane was weak and frail but she beamed with a smile as she told me this. And that personifies Jane: her constant smile and her passion for helping others.
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I’ve known Jane since I was eight years old, we shared our lives for over thirty- five years, built our company, as partners, and I cared for her at home until her last breath. We were the best of friends and, essentially, soul mates. There aren’t the words to describe my grief at the profound sense of loss, and at the shock of her untimely death just four weeks after her terminal diagnosis. But I hold in my heart the essence of her goodness and that she’ll always be looking out for me, and I know many, many others feel the same way too.
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I genuinely feel sad for those who will never experience the joy of knowing Jane and so I hope that this tribute goes some way to helping describe her wonderful spirit, the true asset that she was to the world of flower essences and what a precious gift she was to all whom she met. I am doing all I can to continue the goodness in her honour as I promised her I would. 
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Rest in Peace (in a field of wild flowers) Jane Elizabeth Stevenson, 3rd March 1951 – 12th June 2022.

with love from Ali
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Written by Alice Digby 2023 ©. First published in Essence Magazine, Summer 2023