Grove, is a moderately extensive association of trees without underwood.

"The character of a grove is beauty; for fine trees are lovely objects, and a grove is an assemblage of them, in which every individual retains much of its own peculiar elegance, and whatever it loses is transferred to the superior beauty of the whole. To a grove, therefore, which admits of endless variety in the disposition of the trees, differences in their shapes and their greens are seldom very important, and sometimes they are detrimental. Strong contrasts scatter trees which are thinly planted, and which have not the connexion of underwood; they no longer form one plantation; they are a number of single trees. A thick grove is not, indeed, exposed to this mischief, and certain situations may recommend different shapes and different greens for their effects upon the surface. The eye, attracted into the depth of the grove, passes by little circumstances at the entrance; even varieties in the form of the line do not always engage the attention, they are not so apparent as in a continued thicket, and are scarcely seen if they are not considerable.

"But the surface and the outline are not the only circumstances to be attended to. Though a grove be beautiful as an object, it is, besides, delightful as a spot to walk or to sit in; and the choice and the disposition of the trees for effect within are therefore a principal consideration. Mere irregularity alone will not please, strict order is there more agreeable than absolute confusion, and some meaning better than none. A regular plantation has a degree of beauty; but it gives no satisfaction, because we know that the same number of trees might be more beautifully arranged. A disposition, however, in which the lines only are broken, without varying the distances, is less natural than any; for though we cannot find straight lines in a forest, we are habituated to them in the hedge-rows of fields; but neither in wild nor in cultivated nature do we ever see trees equidistant from each other; that regularity belongs to art alone. The distances, therefore, should be strikingly different; the trees should gather into groups, or stand in various irregular lines, and describe several figures; the intervals between them should be contrasted both in shape and in dimensions; a large space should in some places be quite open, in others the trees should be so close together as hardly to leave a passage between them; and in others as far apart as the connexion will allow.

In the forms and the varieties of these groups, these lines, and these openings, principally consists the interior beauty of a grove." - Whateley.