Nothing conserves like poverty

Sometimes neglect is good. In the city the rich folks live on the hill. In the country it's the poor folk. The big beef farmers and the corn barons have the flat land. Hill farmers are frequently too capital-lacking to make changes in the landscape. Or spray gallons of herbicides on to it. Nothing conserves like poverty. One summer I let the field go, instead of shuffling livestock on to it.

The peasant poet John Clare called plants 'green memorials'. By late June the field had sprouted flowers I'd forgotten existed, flowers such as knapweed and bugle, which were testament to an agricultural usage other than animal parking lot.

J. Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland (2014), 11-12

The siding became a sea wall holding back the waves of housing

A few steps on and the ground gave way on either side, giving the impression of being on an elevated causeway. To my left, through the bare shrubbery, the siding became a sea wall holding back the waves of housing. Tidy terracotta boxes with grey roofs rolled with the landscape's contours like a swelling ocean, its peaks and troughs awash with the debris of suburbia: wires, cars, caravans and, cresting the waves, the square tower of a church, a tree or two and a dull defiance of offices.

R. Cowan, Common ground (2015), 19