Dobyns, Winifred Starr, California Gardens.  The Macmillan Company, New York, 1931.  [1-10], 11-20, [21-210], 4to, 8 ½ by 11”.  Green silk covered boards with gold stamped title of front cover..

First edition first printing.    Faded, spine and top edge very sunned, otherwise good, lacks dust jacket.   209 full page black and white photographs by various photographers.    Forward by the architect Myron Hunt.   Previous owners’ signature and small pasted label on front end pages.

An important book on California garden design.  Winifred Ursula Starr was a successful landscape architect and photographer. California Gardens documenting through artistic photographs the development of the “greatest gardens created in Southern California in the first two decades of the 20th century”.    She and her husband were prominent members of Pasadena society, Mr. Dobyns being a patent attorney and author whose book, The Underworld of American Politics exposed the origin and development of Chicago’s Tammany Hall.

Previous owner’s signature of Romaine B. Ware, dated 1931.    Ware was an author of several books about Lilies, Peonies and other garden flowers.   In the 1960s he and his wife owned a nursey in Canby Oregon.

[$60]