B. K. Sandwell's fanciful solution to this problem is that the shipping lines and seed companies should join forces, promoting a new kind of transportable garden. If it is replenished with plants from the different countries visited, it will become, he says, an ideal souvenir of the trip. Sandwell suggests various possible slogans for this new composite advertising, such as ‘Garden while you gad,’ ‘Cultivate your mind and your garden,’ ‘Culture and horticulture,’ and ‘Take your garden round the world’ (17). But he ends his piece on a more serious note of patriotism: ‘Feverishly as I yearn to visit Seringapatam, when I am reading Mr Cook's descriptions of its beauties, I know in my sober moments that there is no place like Hamilton, Ontario, or Three Rivers, Quebec’ (58). A dynamic between home and mobility animates Sandwell's article and, likewise, the magazine it appeared in. Indeed, all the magazines explored in this book succeed, as Sandwell does, in balancing fantasies of exotic travel with a strong commitment to domestic life and national community. And they all thrived on the middlebrow culture of progress, self-cultivation, and the accumulation of material goods which Sandwell light-heartedly evokes.

The editors of Mayfair present the magazine as the purveyor of a Canadian dream. Their vocabulary of aspiration and distinction belongs to the discourse of the middlebrow, and is intertwined with nationalist sentiment in a way which was entirely characteristic of Canada's mainstream magazines.