Not another cyclist!

Hidden villages, friendly drives, and the pleasure of not planting anything yet

Dunsmore is a tiny Chilterns village. It announces itself only by the way the road narrows around it. You follow the sign from the main road, climb a little, then climb some more. The hedges start to press in, and just as you’re wondering whether you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere near Wendover, a cluster of cottages appears as though it has been there all along, waiting politely for you to catch up.

Andrea and I went to Dunsmore on Sunday for the plant fair. We knew that the weather still hasn’t quite committed to spring, so any small expedition feels like an act of faith. And worth taking an additional layer of something warm.

The car park, when we found it, consisted of a patch of green roughly the size of five cars, all of which were unfortunately there. A man in a high-vis vest waved us further along the lane and gestured us, with a sort of generous flourish, onto the enormous semi-circular gravel drive of what was clearly somebody’s home. A somebody’s very lovely home. We hesitated. It felt, to use my mother’s phrase, a bit much. One man (the owner?) filling his mower with petrol seemed unfazed by our arrival. So we crunched in beside three other cars and a Labrador who had appointed himself chief greeter.

I love this about the Chilterns. The villages are tucked so deeply into the folds of the hills that getting to anything at all requires a small act of trust (in the lane, in the signs, in the person waving you onto their gravel as though you’d been expected for tea). There is no fanfare here. You either find these places or you don’t, and if you do, they reward you fully.

Romantic planting

The plant fair was small and excellent, in the way things in this part of the world can be. Trestle tables, hand-written labels, growers who actually grew the things they were selling. I came away with English geraniums that will bloom in a translucent pink, a campanula whose blue I will have to physically restrain myself from describing as cornflower (everyone says cornflower), and a feathered flurry of cosmos plants, because cosmos always feels like an elegant choice. Andrea filled her box of treats with considered enthusiasm. I made romantic, pastel coloured choices. And popped in a bunch of cut ranunculus in a twist of brown paper, because I couldn’t resist them.

The satisfaction of passing a cyclist

All paid up, we turned to go back down the lane, and then stopped. Because on a single track road, a group of cars coming one way can only mean that you turn and go the other way. Which is what we did. And that’s when the cyclists appeared.

If you have ever driven a single-track Chilterns lane on a Sunday afternoon, you will know the particular choreography required to pass another car. You inch. They inch. Someone tucks into a passing place that is really just a flattened bit of verge. There is a small ceremony of nods and raised hands and mouthed thank-yous through the windscreen. It’s one of the few remaining places where strangers still communicate almost entirely in gesture, and I find it charming, so long as it stays completely friendly. By the third car, we were waving like minor royalty.

But cyclists are another story. Whole gaggles of middle-aged men in lycra. Pedalling and puffing furiously, two abreast. You have virtually no hope of passing them. So we glided along peacefully at the rear. Until I saw my chance annd picked off the occasional straggler at the back. I take a tiny and growing pleasure in moving ahead of these loners to cut them off from their group. I’m not proud of that, you understand.

Farm shop heaven

We eventually stopped at Buckmoorend Farm Shop on the way home, which is a thing I would now recommend to anyone passing within a ten-mile radius. It’s a proper farm shop, where the bread is still warm and the vegetables still have a little soil clinging to them as proof of identity. I loaded up - I won’t list everything, but there was cheese involved, and I felt no shame about it - and added a bottle of local Amersham gin to the basket because, well, because it was there, our stocks were low and it was Sunday.

Outside, a little coffee and tea stand had been set up, and a steady stream of cyclists in lycra were peeling off the lanes to refuel. There were benches, dogs, the smell of bacon from somewhere. It felt like the village version of a service station, only different in every way that matters, which is rather the point. It seems the locals like it too - the farm is right next to the Chequers Estate, where British Prime Ministers retreat from Downing Street on a Friday evening, and host the odd world leader (Mr D Trump being the latest). I hadn’t realised how friendly they all seem to be with the farm, but one glance at their website shows a surprising array of PM’s being fêted there.

(You can see the edge of Chequers Mansion in the second photo)

These are the trips I like best. Twenty minutes from home, great conversation, somewhere small and specific to head towards, and a bag of edible loot for the journey back. No motorway. No carpark ticket. No itinerary beyond plants, then farm shop, then home.

When I got back, I did the thing I have been doing more often lately, which is absolutely nothing useful. I unloaded the plants onto the terrace, lined them up in their small plastic pots, made a pot of tea, and curled up to watch my favourite vlogs - the slow, gentle ones where someone in a French farmhouse arranges peonies for forty minutes.

It’s been cold and wet and properly rainy here since. The kind of weather where the lawn squelches underfoot and the garden looks, frankly, sulky. So the plants are still in their pots, lined up by the back door, and I keep stepping out to look at them and stepping back in again without planting a single thing. I am thinking about where the geraniums want to go. I am consulting the campanula. I am giving the cosmos time to express a preference.

This is one of the small luxuries of a Sunday-bought plant. You don’t have to do anything with it yet. It can sit. You can sit. Decisions can be made next weekend, or the weekend after, when the rain lifts and the soil warms and you have a clearer sense of what your garden is trying to tell you.

I’ll plant them next weekend. Probably.

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