Osmanthus heterophyllus 'Goshiki'

Grown for the leaf rather than the flower, 'Goshiki' is the most colorful of the holly osmanthus. The name means five colors in Japanese, and the spiny, holly-like evergreen leaves earn it: flecked and mottled with cream and yellow against dark green, and flushed at every new growth with startling pink and orange that slowly settles to gold and green. The species name heterophyllus, from the Greek for different-leaved, fits the whole clan, whose juvenile leaves bristle with holly teeth while older ones smooth to entire margins.

A rather dwarf, slow-growing form reaching only four to six feet, 'Goshiki' brings the toughness of the false holly to a compact, brightly variegated plant. Once scarce, the clone is becoming more widely available, and Woodlanders originally obtained this stock from Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland, when the plant was probably a fresh introduction from Japan. Small, waxy, sweetly fragrant white flowers appear in fall, a quiet bonus on a shrub already earning a place on foliage alone.

The false hollies have long stood in Japanese and Chinese gardens as guardians and hedges, the spiny leaves valued for protection much as true holly is in the West, and a sprig of the fragrant fall bloom scents a room. 'Goshiki' carries that heritage into a jewel-box scale, a plant to light a shaded corner where a full-sized osmanthus would overwhelm.

Use 'Goshiki' as a garden accent, a low informal hedge, a foundation shrub, or a container plant, sited where the variegation and the pink-and-orange new growth can be read at close range and set against darker evergreens that throw the color forward. Give well-drained soil in sun or semi-shade, with semi-shade the safer choice in the hot South, where strong sun can scorch the pale leaf markings. Slow and tidy, the shrub asks little once settled, and the holly-like foliage is generally passed over by deer.