Reds and Greens Are Our Garden's Gift for the Holiday

Our gardens may be all but gone. Still, I see nature everywhere donning the colors of the season. Red and green—the berries  and leaves of the holly—stand out against the bare branches around them in my backyard. But less familiar plants and bushes are equally spectacular. Every year around this time, our friends gift us with a bouquet of Yuletide camellias that grow so magnificently on the North Fork. Along a woodland nature trail in East Marion strewn thick with a monochrome carpet of leaves, that traditional red-green palette of the years-end appears in bittersweet and evergreens. Simple rose stems against a green background turn boring into a pop of color. Garden designers urge us to look at what we plant as a year-round proposition. Now is the time when that kind of foresight pays off.