An Essay on the Making of Gardens: Being a Study of Old Italian Gardens, of the Nature of Beauty, and the Principles Involved in Garden Design

London: John Murray, 1909. First edition. 8vo. viii, 109, [1], [2, ads] pp. Publisher's pictorial cloth; small tear to head of spine, some toning and spotting to covers, endpapers foxed, bookseller's ticket to rear pastedown First edition of Sir George Sitwell's classic celebration of the gardens of Tuscany, Rome and the Italian lake district more philosophical treatise than manual of plant care and practical garden design. Before the final overthrow of the Picturesque in the twentieth century, English Romantics looked once more to Italy, perceiving in its decayed villa gardens a certain kind of landscape poetry. Perhaps the most Romantic analysis of Italian villa gardens was by the early-twentieth-century English aesthete Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943), who devoted an entire chapter to its analysis in On the Making of Gardens (Rogers, et al, Romantic Gardens, p. 30)