ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the changing meaning of groves and wildernesses affected their design and maintenance. It highlights how transnational and local trends interacted with, and bridged, various garden styles. The early eighteenth century's renewed interest in classical culture included a search for meaning in the imagery of the antique, cultivated by Alexander Pope and others. This saw groves as haunts of nymphs and satyrs and required a different arrangement; this coincided with the advent of 'Rural and Extensive Gard'ning' in which gardens featured 'Rural Groves' that were open and planted in an irregular manner, rather than in squares or quincunx, as in the earlier more formal gardens. By the middle of the eighteenth century the densely planted French-type groves had substantially been replaced by two main types of groves, with one that became known as shrubbery in the English garden, and the other rural groves that were mainly open, in the English landscape garden.
