Red's lively intensity can be found in foliage as well as flower. The bright stripes of Phormium 'Color Guard' are shown off by the even-hotter-colored flowers of Geum 'Red Wings.'

AUTUMN is my favorite time of the year in the garden, and the bright red of changing leaves the pinnacle of its drama. The show put on by maple and sumac is short, but there is a way to have such fireworks in the spring and summer garden, too. Red-foliaged plants show off the power and energy of their hot coloration over a long season.

Red is brazen and bold, a pure primary color, and such a show-off that it can be tricky to mix with other plantings. Stick a scarlet daylily like Hemerocallis `Aztec' or the shockingly colored Dahlia `Arabian Night' in a pot, and you have a focal point.

But such jolts of saturated color elbow out the more modest colors such as pink, blue and yellow. A satisfyingly easy way to enjoy red's lively heat is with foliage plants. Leafy red is often shaded with other tones and spread over a larger surface, so can serve as a warming backdrop to the less intense colors. And because you have a much longer season with foliage than flower, it is worth basing whole color combinations around red-toned leaves.

Plants we prize for their dark foliage are often really the deeper shades of red, such as maroon and burgundy. If planted where sunlight slants through the leaves, purple shimmers to a glowing oxblood, as with the Heuchera `Bressingham Bronze' or one of the dark smokebushes. And then there are plants with true ruby-colored foliage, like the castor-oil bean, Ricinus communis, whose large splayed leaves and stems glow a bright, glossy cordovan even without the touch of sunlight, as does the dissected red foliage of many of the cut-leafed Japanese maples. A couple of escapees from the vegetable garden provide some of the flashiest red foliage around. The crimson stalks of ruby chard are an electric pinky-red, and the Chinese rhubarb, Rheum palmatum `Atrosanguineum,' has deeply lobed young leaves in vivid crimson.

Now In Bloom Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) has semi-transparent flowers in creamy yellow, with the strong, sweet scent of violets. The shrub itself is ungainly, best planted in a mixed-border where youšll pass by in winter for a hit of fragrance.

There are techniques to promoting red foliage in the garden. The strongest reds are usually produced in bright sunlight, so if you plant a crimson pygmy barberry (Berberis thunbergii `Atropurpurea Nana') in the shade you'll end up with green leaves. But when planted out in the sun the little leaves are a bright purple-red. New springtime foliage is often the most colorful of the season, and for some plants, like smokebush and Prunus x cistena, leaves are larger and more glowingly red if the plant is severely cut back in the early spring.

In many plants, the new foliage just naturally comes on as coppery or bronze-red without the gardener doing a thing. The new shoots of peonies are a soft red, the fernlike foliage of many astilbes comes on a lovely coppery color, and the fresh foliage of Pieris `Forest Flame' is appropriately named.

When you are looking through catalogs or at plant tags, search for plants with the species names autopurpurea, cupreus or sanguineus, meaning, respectively, purple, coppery or red. Along with those mentioned above, these are some of the most effective red-foliage plants:

Phormiums have assorted shades of reddish stripes along their sharp blades. `Color Guard' has intense red-pink stripes set off by deep purple, P. tenax `Dazzler' combines red, orange, bronze and pink.

Coleus is hard to find without some red on its leaves; look for `Red Velvet' or `Bronze Pagoda.'

Cercis canadensis `Forest Pansy' is a small tree whose heart-shaped leaves come on a glowing red-purple in the spring and stay that color all summer.

Rodgersia podophylla is a dramatic perennial with broad, crinkly leaves of rich bronze.

Berberis thunbergii `Red Pillar' has the reddest leaves of any of the barberries, accented by crimson berries.

Japanese blood grass (Imperata cylindrica `Rubra') is a clumping grass whose top half is a rich, strong red.

Valerie Easton is a horticultural librarian and writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com