Flowers and Fruit by Colette Gauthier-Villars

Flowers and Fruit Reviews

• 
  Suzi

  Colette’s passion for life was insatiable. As a young woman she celebrated the loud, scandalous ruckus of the Moulin Rouge with the same enthusiasm she later felt for each quiet flower in her garden. She loved life with an incredible ability to touch and enjoy the heartbeats of everything she experienced. While I believe I have devoured almost every book she ever wrote, it is those she wrote during her aging years that I treasure most. I think ‘Break of Day’ will always be my favorite. In ‘Flowers and Fruit’, Colette is bedridden and suffers with crippling arthritis at the end of her life. She writes of a garden of flowers and fruit that can now blossom only in her imagination. She describes each flower with intimate knowledge of its unique appearance and personality. Colette fills her fantasy garden with flowers in sumptuous detail, always respecting their individual natural beauty while vilifying florists who pluck rusted petals from beautifully aging roses and torture gentle curving stems with stiff wire. In life, Colette loved spring’s cheerful innocence and autumn’s fading blossoms with equal delight and tenderness. Her prose is so sensual that it can be tasted and smelled, and there is a wisdom and gentle intimacy to her later works that is peaceful and comforting. Colette creates her beautiful garden in her imagination, planting in her mind the flowers and memories that she cherishes, where they will forever be nourished and cared for … a garden she will wander through when she faces the last moments of her life. For me, there is no equal to Colette’s writing.
• 
  Keith Miller

  Flowers and Fruit by Colette (1986)
• 
  Michi Martin

  Beautiful and sensual. I wish I could have met this author. She has influenced my own writing with her poetry and has captured my own feelings in her work.
• 
  Randy

  I enjoyed many parts of this book. it was difficult understanding at times perhaps due to being translated from French. Colette's writing has certain truths, and I am sure her and I would share comradery while gardening :-)