The Shielding Power of the Mighty Oak

Originally published 2025-10-12. By Lloyd Nelson, Stewart Kahn Lundy, JPI Biodynamics, Max Leyf.

Biodynamic Digest #12

With your friends Lloyd Nelson and Stewart Lundy

Note: Please remember there is an audio recording included with this piece, and you can adjust the playback speed with the 1x button. Thank you for joining us today!

TWENTY-SEVENTH WEEK OF THE YEAR
by

27. In meines Wesens Tiefen dringen:
Erregt ein ahnungsvolles Sehnen,
Daß ich mich selbstbetrachtend finde,
Als Sommersonnengabe, die als Keim
In Herbstesstimmung wärmend lebt
Als meiner Seele Kräftetrieb.

∇∆

IN stations of my being unremembered
long-lost intimations stir to second life,
faintly, at first a glint, an ember,
a fire kindled by a spark:
a self-encounter in the dark—
the Sun that seems to perish shall abide
for I’ll retain its Warmth through Autumn-tide,
transformed into my soul’s creative power

MARS

Thus speaks the knotty oak,
The servant of iron Mars,
“O Man, take root in the depths
and reach for the heights,
Be mighty and strong
Be warrior, knight and protector.”

• Johannes Hemleben, Seven Trees & Seven Planets

This week, we are making several of the biodynamic preparations, including one of the more challenging: the Oak Bark remedy, BD # 505. The ideal window to make this and several other BD preparations is only a few weeks every autumn.

With biodynamically prepared Oak bark, we have a powerful universal remedy for plant disease. The astronomical forecast shows us a few auspicious times to apply the strength and wisdom of the Oak bark preparation for a healthy, dis-ease free future garden.

Astro forecast

A series of planetary trines occur on October 28th and 29th.To build exceptional soil heath, while imparting insect and disease resistant qualities to our gardens, we can use both the biodynamic astronomical planting calendar and the nine preparations, with emphasis on the Oak Bark preparation to help prevent disease on our farms and in our gardens.

Tea time!

The easiest way to use Oak bark is to make a tea that can be applied directly to plants.

Oak Bark can be used as a seed soak or inoculant. Use it in the garden by making tea from the bark.

• Use 5 grams per liter of water

• Add Oak Bark to cold water and then lightly boil the mixture for 15-20 minutes

• Once cooled, strain the tea and apply as a fine spray

Another simple way for your gardens to receive the benefits of the strengthening and healing effect of Oak is to use the BD #505, biodynamic oak bark preparation.

Keep in mind the biodynamic preparations are all medicines, so they have an inherent one-sidedness to them. Not every plant needs a direct application of each preparation, but if you are working with perennials like grapes or fruit trees, Oak Bark as a spray can be especially effective. Spraying it on lettuce may be less effective, as Pfeiffer’s experiments showed, since spraying Oak Bark on lettuce leaves made the lettuce taste woody, whereas nettles sprayed on lettuce made it taste better.

For the auspicious window between October 28 and 29, beneficial planetary trines will be occurring with the outer planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. A simple way to improve plant and soil health during this window of opportunity would be to spray oak bark and horn manure on October 28th or 29th.

Advanced Application

If you want to offer more support at this time, a more advanced combination would be application of BD# 500 Horn manure with added BD preparations of Oak Bark, Stinging Nettle, Dandelion, and Valerian. You can boost this combination even further with the addition of Equisetum tea. This combined biodynamic application will stimulate a healing effect from the distant planetary forces. When the planets are in optimal alignment, biodynamic practitioners can supercharge soil health.

Why bark?

Steiner tells us that “a wise person sees the dying of the tree in the bark. The wise person sees creation and decay everywhere, and in his heart he carries the feeling that tells him: I see my God reigning in every petal, I experience my God in all creation, and I feel inseparably connected to this God.”1

The entire sense-perceptible world is a kind of “bark” that emerges from the invisible workings of living beings.

“Far, far away from all thy thought doth lie
The written word upon the spirit-heaven
Which with momentous tokens doth announce
New growth upon the tree of humankind.
Thought on the old lines clear and sure may seem,
Yet can it only touch the tree’s coarse bark,
And never reach the living sap within.” 2

The modern world, particularly in the United States, considers only what is sense-perceptible to be real. As Elisabeth Vreele notes from a Steiner lecture: “America, the land of bark culture.”3 Materialism is always concerned about the surfaces of things, never plumbing their spiritual depths – exemplified by tasteless tomatoes in the grocery store that look perfect and seem like a vine-ripened red color, but are devoid of flavor. Questioning materialism doesn’t mean we should avoid microscopes, but it means that a microscope will only show you smaller surfaces and never reveal the secret fire of life itself. In Vedanta, appearances are often called “illusion” (maya) but in the West, appearances are taken to be everything. There is a middle path, where the phenomenology of life allows appearances to be true portals to inner meaning if and only if the surface is not mistaken for the only reality.

One problem in plants is “disease.” Curiously, Steiner actually suggests that plants do not have “disease” in the proper sense, because they do not have an organized “astral body.” Because plants do not have a completely differentiated inner atmosphere the way animals do, they are more susceptible to diseased atmospheric conditions around them. A mammal can warm itself when the environment is cold, but most plants can’t do this. They are “wide open” to the cosmos, which is the reason that Biodynamics still uses the sidereal zodiac: plants are beholden to the cosmos in a way that animals and humans are not; plants are not “unplugged” from the cosmos.

Conditions for Dis-ease

So how does disease arise in a plant? It is still a real phenomenon, but Steiner’s indications are that – particularly for plants – these diseased conditions are really about what’s wrong in the soil and the atmosphere around the plant. What emerges in a plant is a faithful expression of what is happening in the environment above and below, and in each case does the best it can. In this sense, the plant is an ideal spiritual role model. It is not diseased itself, only its environment is diseased. So the answer is: fix the environmental problems around your plants and you will free them from most disease pressures!

As Schiller says:

Suchst du das Höchste, das Größte?
Die Pflanze kann es dich lehren:
Was sie willenlos ist,
sei du es wollend – das ists!

Do you seek the highest, the greatest?
The plant can be your teacher:
what it is without volition
you can be willfully—that’s it!

Too much of a good thing?

What is the primary source of disease in a plant from the biodynamic viewpoint? Excessive wateriness, excessive vitality. This may sound paradoxical, but too much of anything is a bad thing. Steiner’s own description of illness is an otherwise healthy process in the wrong place.

Mars and Oaks connection is well known. Steiner has this to say about “Mars” and the growth of plants:

“[U]nder the influence of the forces which proceed from Mars, the leaf arises, creeping upwards in spiral formation.”4

“[I]t is well for anyone who wants to plant an oak tree to know something of the periodicity of Mars, for an oak tree planted during the appropriate period of Mars will thrive much better than one planted unthinkingly, at any moment that happens to be convenient.”5

Considering how Steiner refers to the leafing-out stage of plant growth as a Mars activity, and the importance of being mindful of the periodicity of Mars, if you transplant an oak when it has leaves, during the spring or summer, it can easily die. But if you wait for it to go dormant and lose its leaves, it does much better. This principle is valid for oaks and for most deciduous trees. By contrast, conifers in particular need attention paid to the sunny side and should maintain this orientation when transplanted.

Disturbed Environ?

When it comes to plant diseases, due to Steiner’s conception of plant “disease” as being environmental rather than an inner astral disturbance, we can offer a general remedy. “For the plant world, we can indeed apply a kind of universal remedy.”6

This is quite different from animals or for human beings, where the nuances are exponentially more complex. For plants, an excess of inner planetary forces are the source of fungus corrupting seeds or growing on leaves, the power of something to make that soft, fleshy quality dry and tough is found in oak bark. Notably, the word tannin comes from a root that means oak. As we can tan hides into durable leather, with oak bark, we “tan” the skin of delicate plants. “In a tree, the outer bark, even though it is the dying part of the organism, is necessary to protect the interior, where the life juices and life forces circulate.”7

Bark is the dying part of the organism which is precisely why we can use it to “kill off” or “damp down” excessive vitality.

“In outer life, the picture of this contradiction can be beautifully observed in the growing tree. On the surface, we see the bark that has imprisoned the inner life, which has stepped back from the surface. Inside, however, we see abundant life, streams of sap rising from the trunk to all the branches, strengthening them and nourishing the leaves, flowers and fruits. Inside, a tree is full of life, but it is covered by a solid shell. And yet this tree needs to be trapped in the solid bark, for how could a tree that was deprived of the bark that seemingly imprisons its life survive the winter, survive storms and tempests? A tree whose trunk is wounded, whose bark is stripped, dies.

Similarly, all of life is permeated by the opposition between life and form…. Death and life, as the two opposites, intervene in all of life, in all events. We find life everywhere – and the form that life simultaneously retains and holds back, so that it does not rush, but also does not immediately disappear.”8

The paradox here is that it is only an excess of vitality that leads to plant diseases, so we must introduce “more death” to make them healthy again.

Venus & Mars

Stewart has observed that the bark of Venus-governed fruit trees, like apples, is strangely delectable to Mars-governed sheep (Aries is ruled by Mars). Cows on his farm ignore nettles and the bark of apple trees, but sheep do the opposite: they devour nettles and the bark of apple trees. The reason for this is that the bark is an excretion of a sort of photo-negative of what the tree is. Just as a cow leaves behind a mirror image of itself in the manure as “I-forces,” so the bark of a Venus tree (apple) is the opposite of Venus: Mars. “The bark-formation of the tree is a particularly characteristic example in which we may observe this excretory process.”9

If we imagine a Mars tree like oak, the bark it produces as its “excrement” belongs to an inner planetary process, Venus, which we then take and place in water with leafy material to decay over winter. This is a heightening of a kind of microaerobic climate in which the Venusian aspect is further accentuated. We must remember that it is because the preparations are remedies that they are also, in a way, a kind of poison, as is the principle governing homeopathy. As Steiner uses the term “moon” in various ways, we can understand the common attribution of the moon to oak bark. Sometimes Steiner says “moon” meaning the literal physical moon above our heads; sometimes he says it as shorthand for the moon-and-the-other-inner-planetary-forces; and sometimes as a singular lunar life force among a spectrum of distinct life forces. The ambiguity of how he terms these things must be intuited contextually. Therefore, oak bark is “moon” by one of these uses of the term and not “moon” by one of the others.

Introduction of the stimulate

By giving the compost pile a tiny amount of oak bark that has putrefied in semi-anaerobic conditions, we introduce a compound oversaturated with vitality which then stimulates an overreaction in the opposite direction, leading to a healthy expulsion of excessive vitality. As Paracelsus says, “the dose is the poison.” By introducing this benevolent poison to the compost, we give it the power to overcome excessively watery, stagnant conditions. There is a kinship between what oak bark does and what equisetum does, except one is a direct transference of qualities (allopathic) and the other is an indirect medicine (homeopathic).

Living Calcium

The making of this remedy combines the bark of an oak tree with the skull of a domesticated animal. This is placed in a waterlogged area surrounded by slimy organic matter such as leaves. In such a context, vinegar is produced, which reacts with the calcium in the oak bark and in the skull, producing calcium acetate. This is the most bioavailable form of calcium for plants and seriously helps mitigate problems such as blossom end rot in the growing season. There are other ways to produce this, as in Korean Natural Farming, where eggshells are submerged in vinegar, but the biodynamic preparation form is shelf-stable.

Jacob Boehme associates bark and skulls, incidentally, with the Mars process:

“Behold and consider a tree: On the outside it hath a hard, gross rind or bark, which is dead, benumbed, and without vegetation—yet not quite dead, but in the impotence; and there is a great difference between the bark and the body that groweth next under the rind or bark…. The astringent quality was the encompasser or encloser of the life… thou canst not deny that the brain in the head in a creature is the power of the heart; for from the heart all powers rise up into the brain, from whence, in the brain, the senses of the heart exist. The brain in the head taketh its original form the power of the heart.” - Jacob Boehme, Aurora

Here Boehme speaks to the fact that what we reflect on in thought is, as Steiner later suggests, after the felt experiences of the heart. And thus, the brain has a “lunar” quality in relation to the “sun” of lived experience. But that which encapsulates the fatty tissue of the brain is radically different from the moon: something hard, dry, and astringent. As Equisetum mitigates excessive “moon forces”, one might similarly suggest that the Oak Bark preparation overcomes a kindred inner planetary process that is in excess, particularly the venusian quality.

“Trees surround themselves with bark and the bark of oaks and willows is the most potent because it is there that the astral forces have taken the strongest hold. But all trees containing tannic acid, as it is called, are trees in which the astral forces have taken a strong hold. Consequently the juice that can be squeezed or extracted by boiling from the bark of willows or oaks is a useful antidote because with it one can drive out of the astral body what has trespassed into it through the plant poison.”10

Steiner recommends (interchangeably) willow (Salix spp.) or oak bark (Quercus spp.) as a potential remedy for asthma, where the etheric body has overreached, compromising the muscles. In this situation, the astral body does not take hold strongly enough. However, there has been little research done on this for biodynamics; the proximity of Steiner’s recommendations of these two kinds of bark shows possibly additional opportunities for biodynamic research.

What arises?

Here we have a puzzle. What arises in oak bark is an “intermediate” product between plant-nature and “living earthy nature.” We must consider this carefully. As there is dead earthy nature, there is living earthy nature. There are finished “dead” crystals and there are dynamic earth processes of crystallization that are still ongoing, still becoming, still alive.

“The forms of crystals stand midway between mineral substances of the formless sort, such as those we encounter in gases, liquids, and so on, and the living forms of the plant world.” R. Steiner, Theosophy, 150-151

Earth Crystal?

As a crystal is an intermediate between dead mineral nature and the living plant world, bark belongs between these crystal forms and plant nature itself. A great paradox is that, while the physical world is denser than the etheric world, somehow it floats to the surface. What’s that all about? It is like ice. As water gets colder, it contracts and gets denser and denser until – suddenly – it crystallizes in its coldest state and rises to the surface. This is the entire nature of the sense-perceptible physical world of skin, minerals, and bark. What rises to the surface is crystallized out of the liquid flow of the cambium. You could almost imagine bark as a kind of earthy crystal that would naturally sink to the center, except that in its semi-crystalline form it becomes buoyant and floats to the surface.

What Oak to use?

In his Agriculture Course, Rudolf Steiner tells us to use the English Oak, Quercus robur, a common oak in Europe. However, one of Steiner’s closest students, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, found the highest concentration of calcium in a White Swamp Oak, Quercus alba, growing in Maryland, USA. In other countries, such as Mexico, there are hundreds of species of oaks. It is impossible to say there is only one right kind.

In the United States, we usually prefer to use the white oak, Quercus alba, for making BD# 505. We may consider our white oak as a suitable substitute for the Steiner-recommended English oak. We use this white oak regularly as a necessity because English oak is not commonly available in America.

It is noteworthy that we usually do not seek regionally appropriate substitutions for biodynamic preparation plants such as Yarrow, Chamomile, Oak, Dandelion, and Valerian unless they do not grow well in a given bioregion and locality. Stinging nettle is the one plant that Steiner tells us we should not substitute, because its action is so potent and close to the heart. With the Oak, we are wise to seek the ones that grow naturally in a given environment.

Hugh Courtney had large white oak trees growing on the lower slopes of his farm in rural Virginia. He would have us collect the outermost bark – the deadest part – from living oak trees, some of them well over a century old.

Exploring Variations

When I started making biodynamic preparations in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I had to search for a suitable substitute to the grand, tall white oak trees that grow naturally in the forests of the East Coast and Midwest. Several regional Biodynamic practitioners promptly informed me that we should import white oak from another area where it grows naturally. Looking up from the valleys, gazing towards the southern slopes of the Rockies, one can see vast Oak thickets growing. I immediately researched the local oak and was fascinated that no one was using the Oak of the high Rocky Mountains. The gambrel Oak was dismissed by some as unusable because it did not rise to the grand proportions of the majestic, tall white oaks.

Pic: Oak and juniper forest above the canyons of Colorado

In the desert regions of the southwest and on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, we find Quercus gambelii, the common Gambel oak. Commonly called scrub oak, this tree is a much smaller-growing white oak than the grand trees we see growing. However, this locally adapted, powerful medicinal Oak is the perfect substitute for the areas in which it grows naturally. This is an appropriate land medicine for the high elevations of the mountains and the desert southwest.

Steiner tells us “not to be deceived by things that look big and swollen: what is important is that their appearance be consistent with real nutritive power.” The humble scrub oak has much nutritive power, even if it doesn’t rise to the heights of its towering relatives. But we have to consider the atmosphere in Virginia versus Colorado. In Virginia, the swamp oak must overcome an enormous amount of water in the ground and humidity in the air – so of course it must reach up to the heavens! In Colorado, we’re so high up we’re almost already in the clouds, so the native oak only has to just peek out of the soil and find itself in the right astrality.

Test and Try

Just because someone hasn’t tried it does not mean you should not carry out your own experiments! What local adaptations are awaiting our trials? Now, after a decade-plus of testing and trials, almost everyone in our mountain region uses the scrub oak to make BD# 505. Many regionally appropriate adaptations will be needed to carry Biodynamics into the future.

When we head to warm and sunny California in a few weeks, we will be looking for another type of Oak for our Biodynamic preparations. The great Oaks in the grass valley and beyond have been used as a vital source of food for millennia. It is an incredible experience to harvest Oak bark from the very same trees indigenous peoples were collecting acorns from not too long ago. Under some of these great oaks we still find the grinding bowls for making acorn flour that was baked into loaves of bread.

With the oak bark preparation, we have a universal remedy for plant disease. An application of Oak bark during the extraordinarily beneficial planetary astronomical event happening October 28th and 29th will help create a healthy, disease-free garden.

Go Biodynamic, For Life!