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When it comes to creating accents with color, gardeners most often choose plants with attractive blossoms. All well and good, but the variety of leaf coloration that woody perennials and shrubs have to offer means even more possibilities for designing your grounds — and practicing some exquisite taste with plants that are striking for their golden yellow, red, or variegated foliage.

Yellow, Red, Blue

Woodland trees that have unusually colored leaves look particularly spectacular when skillfully combined with plants that have simple green foliage. The Gleditsia ‘Sunburst,’ with its filigreed, light-colored leaves, is eye-catching even from a great distance when paired well with other trees, for example. There are other deciduous trees that will enrich your garden’s palette with many-colored leaves, including the Box Elder/Ash-leaf Maple ‘Flamingo,’ which has foliage that’s partially tinted pink and gives an impression of fine lace. Another appealing choice for garden design: shades of blue, such as that of the Juniperus ‘Blue Arrow.’ There are many other conifers with blue or yellow tones that can provide surprising variation throughout the yard. These often also have statuesque forms and provide further impetus for good design: naturally columnar, spherical, with a spreading or a flat, planar growth habit, these plants are well suited to an imaginative playing with forms, and they don’t even require regular pruning.
Particularly compelling is the golden yellow Himalayan Cedar ‘Golden Horizon.’ It’s impressive and out-of-the-ordinary, with sweeping growth patterns and elegantly arching branches.

Any garden can be enlivened by distinctly patterned grasses, such as the white-striped Carex ornithopoda ‘Variegata,’ and by varieties of shrubs that have brightly colored leaves. Other plants that exhibit decorative leaf coloration are hostas, lungworts, and spotted deadnettles. The small leaves of aubretia ‘Silberrand’, edged in white, are particularly distinctive, especially when contrasted with their spring-blooming, blue-violet flowers. There’s also carpet phlox (Phlox subulata and probumbens varieties), which greatly enhance an outdoor area with multicolored leaves and, like the aubretia, grow into thick, pillowy swaths.

About Placement

This goes for all colored-leaf trees and plants: Less is often more. Too many similarly colored plants in one spot, and the effect is lost; it’s the contrast with a darker surrounding that brings out the color and lets that one, unique plant appear really sumptuous. Many plants that have light-colored foliage are sensitive to too much sunlight, due to a lack of chlorophyll. These are therefore ideal for perking up areas of partial shade. Physocarpus ‘Dart’s Gold,’ with its yellow leaf coloration, will even bring luminance to an area of full shade.

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