In rural Dorset, near the small village of Higher Bockhampton, is an almost impossibly perfect thatched cottage, surrounded by a typical cottage garden and mature, towering woodland. It looks exactly how you would imagine a thatched cottage should look; small and rustic with irregular outbuildings, little windows tucked up in the eaves of the thatch, chimneys sprouting through the roof and creepers growing haphazardly over a central front door. This cottage is the birthplace of Thomas Hardy. Born in 1840, he lived here until he was 34, during which time he wrote Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), among other works.

The English mentality makes perfect sense once you’ve stood still in a country garden. It’s not like France, where everything is clipped, preened and formally arranged into polite symmetry. Here in the rolling Wessex countryside, I find myself inside what feels like a yew-hedged compound — but the hedges aren’t meant to exclude so much as to create little pockets of privacy, soft boundaries rather than hard walls.

The garden here isn’t laid out in grand beds or regimented borders. Instead, it’s an "organized mess" — a layered, lived-in tangle. Bluebells and daisies erupt straight from the earth, no one tells them where to go, and the garden seems to politely agree. Everything is both contained and wild at the same time, as if nature and human intention reached a quiet handshake.

That, I think, is the soft power of the English country garden: it offers freedom, but within subtle boundaries. Nothing shouts, but everything whispers. The English mind, too, seems to value this — an affection for the understated, for imperfection, for gentle order without overbearing control. It’s the kind of place that makes you understand the nation without a single conversation.