5 ideas
Colette recounts a letter from her mother, Sido, who turns down an invitation to visit her daughter and son-in-law because her pink cactus is about to bloom. It flowers only once every few years, and at her age she may not see it again.
Using the exact name of a variety, a smell or a stage of growth forces the eye to distinguish what a general word would blur. Colette's prose depends on naming the particular plant before describing it, so the vocabulary does the observing. A writer who says 'flower' has stopped looking. A writer who names the specific tulip has to keep looking.
Colette sets aside the sentimental 'language of flowers,' where a rose means love and a lily means purity. Instead she describes each plant by its behaviour: how it grows, opens, droops, smells, resists or gives way, often compared to animals or people. Meaning comes from watching what the plant does, not from a convention attached to it.
Colette knows a flower or fruit through smell, touch, taste and texture as much as through sight: a petal's thickness, a fruit's weight and ripeness in the hand, a garden's scent at a certain hour. Sensory detail here is not decoration. It is the evidence, and a description that uses only the eyes counts as half an observation.
Colette measures later gardens, fruits and flowers against the Burgundy garden of her childhood, which her mother tended, in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. That remembered place gives her a baseline of attention and a vocabulary learned early. It is the reference against which every later plant is noticed, judged and named.