prismatic

There is a singular shrub in own garden, really the focal point of the tiny patch of yard that we share, whose leaves are a very dark green, almost black upon maturity.  I wonder what alternative routes to photosynthesis that the non-green leaved plants took.  By being another color do they absorb more or different parts of the spectrum, even into non-visible light?  I will need to read up on this.  And if not cultivated, would whole fantastic, other worldly crayon box regions of forest pop up.  Except in the darkest jungle, I imagine that the sun shines pretty uniformly everywhere, and even cactuses are camouflaged the same as oaks.  The strange thing about color, especially when one thinks of it terms of powering plant metabolism, is that that green leaf is really every color in the world but green, and human eyes only detect it as so because the particular shade of green is reflected back.