Visually speaking, folks characterize the form or matter that gets arranged in relation to what it is arranged around (text on a page, flowers on canvass, church in a city) as figure and ground or object and field. The text is the figure and the whiteness of the page is the ground. Or a fried egg is the figure and the pan is the ground. A piazza in Rome is the object and the fabric of the surrounding city is the field. They need one another for legibility - the figure and its background. The trick is getting them to tango.
In ramping terms, North Carolina and Michigan form a figure ground compliment: the South has patches and the Midwest fields. When you dig ramps in Michigan you make dents in the seemingly endless expanse. In North Carolina you search out intermittent patches from a ground of competing flora.
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