From many long years of drilling proper grammar into children's heads, I know that one of the main problems students encounter in learning grammar is the inconsistency of English nouns and verbs. If the exact same form of a word can be used as a noun or a verb or an adjective, with very different meanings I might add, identifying parts of speech becomes an obstacle course of rules and exceptions. Diagramming would be so much simpler, both to teach and to learn, if every word could be used only as a single part of speech. So instead of worrying whether land is the subject or predicate of a sentence, the child could simply memorize the type of word, in this case predicate, and be on his way to more important things, like poetry appreciation. Now, whereas above I suggested eliminating the noun form of a word, here I'll suggest that the verb form be removed.
Ground is a singularly uninspiring word.
It is a neutral word, having neither definite positive or negative associations. Another wonderful short story by Barbara Kingsolver illustrates this perfectly. I can find no outside connotations except the idea of stability here. Thus, because this word is so neutral, it must be defined only in this way to protect this neutrality. It simply means what it says.