Trachelospermum asiaticum 'Ogon Nishiki'

'Ogon Nishiki' is Asian star jasmine dressed for a festival. New leaves break coppery orange and scarlet, then settle through gold and cream into a marbled patchwork of green, yellow and orange, so an established plant carries three or four colors at once and shifts them with the season. Cold weather pushes the older foliage toward red. The leaves are small, thick and evergreen on wiry stems, and the effect from across a garden is less like a variegated vine than like a slow fire moving over the ground.

The genus name is built from the Greek trachelos, a neck, and sperma, a seed, for the narrow-necked seeds, and the epithet asiaticum places the species in Japan and Korea, where the plant grows wild. Trachelospermum belongs to Apocynaceae, the dogbane family, in the company of oleander, periwinkle and frangipani, and shares the family habit of bleeding a milky latex from any cut stem. The cultivar name is Japanese: ogon, gold, and nishiki, brocade. For once that is not nursery hyperbole. Brocade is exactly the right word for the way the color is worked through the leaf.

Left to run, the plant makes a dense evergreen groundcover a foot or two deep, rooting as the stems travel. Given a wall, a post or a trellis, the same plant will twine upward to ten or fifteen feet. Small white flowers come in summer, fragrant in the manner of the confederate jasmines but far more sparingly on a variegated plant than on a green one, and anyone buying this cultivar for perfume has bought the wrong star jasmine. The foliage is the whole point. One note for the herbal-minded: the related Trachelospermum jasminoides carries a long history in Chinese medicine as luo shi teng, but that tradition belongs to the other species and we make no claim for this one.

Site 'Ogon Nishiki' in full sun to part shade, in ordinary well-drained soil, where the color can be read against something plain: dark evergreens, gravel, a weathered fence, the foot of a brick wall. The variegation burns brightest in sun and drifts back toward green in deep shade, so trade a little leaf scorch for the better brocade if the choice comes up. Hardy through USDA zones 7 to 10, evergreen throughout. Two honest cautions come with the color. Green shoots will sometimes revert and, being more vigorous than the variegated growth, need cutting out as they appear or they will quietly take the plant over. And the milky sap can irritate skin, so wear gloves when cutting the vine back.