To transfer to our own concerns a method developed elsewhere is one of the most valuable services imagination can render.  Almost all educational reform comes about thus, most mechanical inventions, a great part of economy and comfort in individual homes.  Also, besides these particular advantages, the incessant coming and going between the different fields of activity, the circulation of attention which this use of the imagination involves, tends to vitalise and enrich not only the individuals who carry it out, but the whole social organism of which they form part.

Upon the moral side not much need be said.  “Put yourself in his place” is a very old and respectable recipe for growing justice in one’s conduct, consideration in one’s speech, sympathy in one’s heart.  As employer or magistrate, as teacher or nurse, as customer or shopman, as parent or husband or child we must all deal somehow with our fellow-men:  honestly and truthfully, we mean, kindly and helpfully, we hope.  But is it not the more or the less of our imagination that makes such dealings possible?  Without it, we are cruel because of something we do not feel, unjust because there is something we do not know, unwittingly deceitful because there is something we do not understand.  With it, our justice will support, our kindness uplift, our attempt at help will not be barren, but will awake response and raise the whole level of our human intercourse into a region of higher possibilities.

 E.M.  Cobham.

 Futurist gardening.

 To-morrow’s flowers.

These three months of July, August and September are the second seed-time.  I think they must be the most proper sowing-time, for is it not clear that Nature sows seed, not in spring, but in autumn?  At any rate, now we can do more towards making a perpetually beautiful flower garden than in any other season.  The biennials, those that blossom in their second year of life and those jolly perennials that come up year after year and always stronger than before, without any trouble on our part, are best started in life not too long before the winter.  Spring-sown seed sometimes forgets that it is biennial and blossoms rather futilely the same summer, and at other times it grows so lush and large by winter that it cannot stand the frost.

Now we see the flowers in blossom in the vineyards of our friend Naboth and we know which we should most like in our own garden.  There is an exquisite joy in begging or stealing a few seeds and bringing them home to blossom for us as they did for Naboth.  I carry at this time a few small envelopes bought for a few pence a hundred at Straker’s, and whenever I see something nice in seed I bag it.  In another week it would drop beneath the plant it grew on and, not being cared for by a gardener, would be smothered or hoed up.  In a nice little seed-bed