A Word for the Axe 
effect is distressing indeed when they are of 
alien, inharmonious kinds. This is not an 
uncommon sight. It is not uncommon to 
find even a tapering evergreen and a round- 
headed deciduous tree growing so close to 
one another that their branches interlock, 
and their discordant forms and colors and 
textures are welded together in a union as 
unnatural to the mind as displeasing to the 
eye. 
These words for the axe have often been 
spoken before. In all lands, in all times, 
thoughtless persons have probably held it 
criminal, under any avoidable circum- 
stances, to cut down a tree; and so the 
whole literature of gardening art echoes the 
complaint of the modern artist — the cry that 
no difficulty with which he has to cope is so 
great as the difficulty of making an owner 
thin out his plantations at the proper time 
and in the proper way. Brown, the famous 
English landscape-gardener of the eighteenth 
century, has been bitterly abused by later 
generations because he bequeathed them mul- 
titudes of close, round, hard clumps of trees, 
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