In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall-grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were captured and imprisoned in the Los Angeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction effort has since been started.) Except in northern Minnesota and northwestern Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Four per cent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other ‘varmints’. Dams choke most of the continent’s rivers and streams. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance. Theodore Roosevelt
The birds chant melody on every bush,
The snakes lies rolled in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind
And make a chequered shadow on the ground ...
But when ye have the honey ye desire
Let not this wasp outlive, us both to sting. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus II iii 22-25 & 131-132, Tamora
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892
An everyday story of country folk. The Archers radio series
I like the country but I can’t live in it. I just have to come back to town to work. I hate to hear those things singing out there in the morning. Francis Bacon, cited The Art of Francis Bacon
I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. Sydney Smith, letter to John Murray, 1834
An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books. James Thomson, The Seasons
Now the winds are all composure,
But the breath upon the bloom,
Blowing sweet o’er each enclosure,
Grateful off’rings of perfume.
Tansy, calaminth and daisies
On the river’s margin thrive;
And accompany the mazes
Of the stream that leaps alive. Christopher Smart, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1765
Are you a yokel? Are you a local yokel? You’re a local yokel. Are you married to your sister? The Catherine Tate Christmas Show, Lauren in kayak to fisherman on bank
Those shining stars, he liked to point out, were one of the special treats for people like us who lived out in the wilderness. Rich city folks, he’d say, lived in fancy apartments, but their air was so polluted they couldn’t even see the stars. We’d have to be out of our minds to want to trade places with any of them. Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste. Miss Read, Village Diary
This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named ‘myxomatosis’, into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams’s lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Country things are the necessary root of our life – and that remains true even of a rootless and tragically urban civilization. To live permanently away from the country is a form of slow death. Esther Meynell
The moon was coming slowly up over the hill in front of them. The countryside was bathed in light, pale and cold and silvery. Everything could be seen quite plainly, and Lotta and Jimmy thought it was just like daytime with the colours missing. Enid Blyton, Mr Galliano’s Circus
The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon. James Carlos Blake, Wildwood Boys
The Sussex lanes were very lovely in the autumn ... spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end ... earth scents and the sky winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul. Monica Baldwin
I’m a man with many defects. I love. I sing. I dream. I was born in the poor countryside. I was raised in the countryside, planting corn and selling sweets made by my grandmother. My children, my two daughters are with me and I want a better world for my grandchildren, for your grandchildren. Hugo Chavez
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. J R R Tolkien
I’ve been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I’ve come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters. Arthur Smith
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. ibid.
In my experience once young people sample the delights of country life and the wonders of Nature, oh, they can’t get enough of it. Carry on Camping 1969 starring Sid James & Kenneth Williams & Joan Sims & Charles Hawtrey & Terry Scott & Barbara Windsor & Bernard Bresslaw & Hattie Jacques & Peter Butterworth et al, director Gerald Thomas, Kenneth Williams to Hattie Jakes
The country habit has me by the heart,
For he’s bewitched for ever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leave with sun. Vita Sackville-West, The Land: ‘Winter’, 1929
This is the voice of high midsummer’s heat.
The rasping vibrant clamour soars and shrills
O’er all the meadowy range of shadeless hills,
As if a host of giant cicadae beat
The cymbals of their wings with tireless feet,
Or brazen grasshoppers with triumphing note
From the long swath proclaimed the fate that smote
The clover and timothy-tops and meadowsweet. C G D Roberts, The Mowing