Right next to the pond were patches of dark green succulent leaves, dark red at their edges. Where the green shaded into red was a color he couldn’t name, a dark lustrous brown stuffed somehow with both its constituent colors. He would have to call up a color chart soon, it seemed: lately when looking around outdoors he found that a color chart came in handy about once a minute. Waxy almost- white flowers were tucked under some these bicolored leaves. Farther on lay some tangles, red- stalked, green- needled, like beached seaweed in miniature. Again that intermixture of red and green, right there in nature staring at him.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars, 1993.
by 
