The fair-weather gardener, who will do nothing except hen wind and weather and everything else are favourable, is never a master of his craft.

Gardening, above all other crafts, is a matter of faith, grounded, however (if on nothing better), on his experience that somehowor other seasons go on in their right course, and bring their right results.

No doubt bad seasons are a trial of his faith; it is grievous to lose the fruits of much labour by a frosty winter or a droughty summer, but, after all, frost and drought are necessities for which, in all his calculations, he must leave an ample margin; but even in the extreme cases, when the margin is past, the gardener's occupation is not gone.

- Canon Ellacombe, In a Glouchestershire Garden, 1895