Lizzie Le Blond Album 3

“Guide to the Old Gardens of Italy” 1894-1906

​

This album is a collection of Lizzie’s finest Italian gardens images taken over a number of trips.  We know some of her photos were gathered and used to illustrate Henry Ingio Triggs classic 1906 book, The Art of Garden Design in Italy in which she did the primary photography of all the design plates as well.  She eventually wrote her own gardens book, The Old Gardens of Italy, How To Visit Them first published in 1913 and later republished in 1926 under the revamped title Guide to the Old Gardens of Italy.

​

This passage is the opening of her first Old Gardens Book:

THIS little book only aims at guiding the traveller to most of the old gardens of Italy and leaves it to the larger works to furnish him with fuller information and more numerous plans. The author, when illustrating " The Art of Garden Design in Italy," by H. Inigo Triggs, was struck by the difficulty experienced in finding the various gardens and learning from whom permission to view them was obtainable. It seemed to her that a small volume including as many gardens as she could hear of, and condensed within reasonable limits, might find a place between the big books giving technical information, and those, such as Elgood's beautiful " Italian Gardens," that aim more especially at the pictorial representation of a subject intensely fascinating from whatever standpoint it is viewed.