Beatrice Hale
As a nine and ten year old I spent six months in the local Children’s Hospital in Aberdeen. Rheumatic fever was one of the nasties at that time, and a number of the children in the ward were victims, all of us on bed rest, the treatment at that time. One method of self-amusement was reading. The Dimsie books, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, were among the one or two books a week that my favourite aunt brought in for me.
From Dimsie Goes to School to Dimsie Grows Up and Dimsie Carries On, Dimsie has remained a favourite with me for many years.
The most influential was Dimsie Grows Up. The morality of the tale strikes me afresh every time I look at the book. Dimsie could not fulfil her ambition to become a doctor; her father had died and left very little money. Sadly, reluctantly, but determined to be cheerful and not to moan (moral message here!), Dimsie decides to join her mother in the old family home in Perthshire. She begins to travel north from her school on the south coast of England, but a train strike intervenes. A fellow traveller hires a car and several passengers abandon the train journey and drive north with him. He just happens to be a doctor who eventually takes up a practice in Perthshire. No prizes for guessing one of the story’s themes.
Dimsie’s family home includes an old garden on a west-facing hillside. It is her great-grandmother’s garden of healing with many of the old herbs still growing, but a wilderness, nevertheless, untouched for years.
So, in the spirit of healing and of making the best of things, Dimsie turns her attention to herbal medicine, and begins to reclaim the garden, employing as many people as she can to help dig and weed, and also of course, provide characters in the story. Eventually the garden comes to be filled with plants with “strange aromatic perfumes”. Particular herbs mentioned are lavenders, rosemary, lemon balm, foxgloves, marigolds and garlic. There must have been many others, since Dimsie boasts of her garden having a thousand fragrances. And there are frequent references to the many-greats grandmother, who is said to haunt the garden. Maybe that’s why the herbs were so successful. Her herbs grow magnificently, so much so that she can supply various local pharmacists with herbs to assist in their dispensing. Not only that, the new local doctor, who rescued Dimsie, just happens to be interested in herbs, and asks if Dimsie can supply herbs for his practice. The ending of this part of the story is obvious – of course Dimsie and the doctor marry.
There is another ending to Dimsie Grows Up, and that is the establishment, many years later, of my herb garden in Dunedin, New Zealand. We settled into our new house, and there in the garden was lavender a-plenty, thyme and rosemary. “Now’s your chance,” said my husband. “Fill up with herbs.”
So I did, an inexperienced gardener cherishing and encouraging seedlings and small plants and learning from the local Herb Society members as I went. With Elizabeth Hinds, then director of The Otago Early Settlers’ Museum (Toitu), I wrote several herb books, culminating in The New Zealand Pleasure Garden: Gardening for the Senses, which emphasises that herbs are plants for all the senses – visual, taste, touch, smell, hearing (think of bees) – as well as providing mental stimulus (think stories in history).
Among my many favourites are appleringie or southernwood, aka lad’s love, maiden’s ruin, old man – or, politely, Artemisia abrotanum – with it’s intriguing scent. Appleringie is excellent as an insect repellant, among other things. Or how about alecost or costmary, aka Bibleleaf. Alecost as a name refers to the use of the plant in flavouring ales and spiced wine. Bibleleaf refers to its use as a marker in the Bible, with its fragrance keeping Tudor churchgoers wide awake during lengthy sermons.
I avoid medicinal use of herbs, best left to the experts, but I do enjoy household uses. Try lavender in pillows. Dry lavender flowers, rub them, put into small cotton bags, and tuck them into pillows. Very good for a peaceful night’s sleep. Need insect repellants? Dry the leaves and again make bags, tuck them wherever the insects appear.
My garden is a healing place, much like Dimsie’s in far off Scotland. Getting my hands in the soil, readying it to support the plants. Sowing seeds and seedlings, and watching them grow. Enjoying their beauty. Smelling, tasting, using the leaves, reading the stories, connecting with the past. The herb garden is more than just plants in the earth. It’s a world in itself.
Beatrice Hale is a social worker and writer who lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Read about Beatrice Hale’s time as a child in hospital with rheumatic fever here.
For more on aromatic herbs and landscapes, read:
- Here be lavender by David Goodwin
- Scent mapping Signal Hill by Laurence Fearnley
Very enjoyable. Thanks for sharing Dimsie with us and the aroma of your garden washed across my senses. An absolute gem in showing how good books are for children. We know not what seeds we sow with the gift of a book!
Thanks, Jan! the garden is glowing at the moment, I love it.
And I got a lot of reading done way back then, most of which has remained with me.
Beatrice
Thank you Beatrice, your writing took me back many years… walking down your path, it had recently rained and the smell! How evocative smell is to memory, I’ve quite forgotten what took me to your door but the smell remains so sweetly. I wanted a garden like yours. Fascinating to read how your hunger for gardening began with a book.
Lovely, Beatrice!
Thanks, Jocelyn! I’ve got the whole series right through to WW2.
I’ve only just read your post, but you might be interested to know that I have worked out where Dimsie’s family home in Scotland was – not in Perthshire, but in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland, specifically near the town of Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula. There are quite a few clues in ‘Dimsie Grows Up’: to reach ‘Dunkirnie’ as it’s known in the book, it was necessary to take the passenger ferry from Gourock, near Glasgow, across the Firth of Clyde. There are now regular car ferries doing much the same route, but there weren’t in the 1920s, and to reach Dunoon by car from the Glasgow direction would have involved a long detour of over 70 miles around the top of the Firth of Clyde. There’s a village called Kirn, now a suburb of Dunoon, which is clearly where the name Dunkirnie came from. I went there on holiday in May last year, staying in an apartment at Kilmun, across the sea loch (Loch Shee in the book, Holy Loch in real life). This is where I believe Erica Innes’s family home Kilaidan is situated (the local saint in the book is St Aidan, but in reality St Munn). There are quite a few other clues to the location in the book which are not very much changed even now. Dimsie’s home Twinkle Tap seems to have been set near the head of the sea loch, in a village which is called Sandbank, overlooking Kilmun across the loch. Naturally, I searched for any record of a large herb garden, historic or otherwise, but although I spotted houses in the right sort of position, I couldn’t find any sign that one ever existed on that site. Yet I’m sure that Dorita Fairlie Bruce must have had a real garden in mind, as she describes it so evocatively – perhaps she just transposed it from somewhere else (her own Scottish home was at Largs in Ayrshire, on the other side of the Firth of Clyde), maybe to protect the owner from unwanted publicity. I’ve loved this book for over 50 years, and it’s been a great influence on my desire to grow as many herbs as possible in my own garden in Cornwall. Someone recently described my garden (which is on a much smaller scale) as one of healing, which for me was the greatest compliment anyone could give me.