The Royal Horticulture Society has a color book that can be used to identify the color of a plant’s leaves. This is not always necessary, but provides a standardization for the naming of color, which can vary widely within one language by a person’s interpretation, as well as between languages fundamentally.

In regards to color documentation for color theory applications, the Royal Horticulture Chart will be used as the standard reference for plant color identification. RHS Chart elsewhere: this same color chart is used with food colorings, chemical engineering companies and fabric designers.

a scheme can be abstracted from the plants based on analogous or complimentary colors, referenced against the Royal Horticulture Society’s manual.

It is up to the designer to choose what sort of composition to start from.

For example a plant displays a light yellow green, middle, lighter green, and then full green. This would be an example of analogous color.

If you took the red from the petals of its flower and then the full green from its leaves, it is a complementary color composition. In reverse, if an abstracted composition is created, plants that have similar color can be selected and then placed into a system of mosaic.

By selecting plants based on positive characteristics as explained by the choosing by advantages model, plants can be paired based on the best possible outcome, while considering all of the criteria, not those only limited to color theory.

An example of analogous color from a brown leaf in watercolor.