A tender perennial, the Ball Lily or Blood Lily creates lush, tropical leaves that pop up after a beautiful display of bright red, ball shaped flowers that are actually round clusters of a lot of smaller flowers. Often known to elicit the feeling of watching a Dr. Seuss film, they are a red flower similar to the more well-known and popular allium because of their globular shape. 

The Blood Lily makes an excellent companion plant for the Coral Bark Maple Tree due to its preference for dappled shade. A Coral Bark Maple Tree left to form its natural shape or pruned to allow more light beneath its shady canopy, provides a perfect environment for the Blood Lily to thrive. The red hue of the Blood Lily flowers complements the coloring of the Coral Bark Maple Tree's reddish trunk and branches, making them a beautiful and perennial pairing. 

As the Blood Lily matures, it will produce more bulbs and flowers to create a nice flowering, red meadow in the dappled shade of the Japanese Maple tree.

For a lovely perennial accent that comes in different varieties depending on which color you'd like to accent in your Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree, the hakone grass is a beautiful choice as it is shade-loving, slow-spreading, and creates a lovely ground cover that will help to preserve moisture in the soil to prevent your Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree from suffering from heat stress during a hot summer. Due to it's slow-spreading nature, hakone grass is an excellent way to add some color in an otherwise difficult spot for most colorful ornamental plants to thrive in.

A stunning, clumping bamboo with yellow culms that reach up to the sky adding lemony coloring to your landscape or garden, Asian Lemon Bamboo is a wonderful choice for pushing some structure on the soft and round canopy of the Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree. Asian Lemon Bamboo can act as a wonderful wind break and provide some soft shade when planted in towards the afternoon sun, in relation to the Japanese Maple Tree. This prevents the leaves of the Coral Bark Japanese Maple from scorching in hot summers where they might not have access to regular watering.

Although Phormium is, in fact, a sun-loving perennial, when creating a garden bed that adds the finishing look to the specimen tree, the Coral Bark Japanese Maple, it becomes an excellent choice to put around the edge of the canopy, where it can receive heavy sunlight, but also act as a structural grass-like element for the round canopy of the Coral Bark Maple. 

Phormium, or New Zealand Flax, comes in many colors, including a bold red, called "Amazing Red Phormium" and a softer red "Jester Phormium" that make excellent complements and beautiful companion plants for the Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree.

For a beautiful and bright tropical accent that is perennial, fast growing, and an excellent ground cover for the Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree, the Hawaiian Punch elephant ear with it red coloring will be a beautiful complement. Depending on how you choose to design your plant Guild, this lovely elephant ear plants can be in the foreground of your Coral bar Japanese maple or in the background as it is shade tolerant and gross to four or five feet. It can further be softened by adding a perennial grass to fill in the spaces between the elephant ear bulbs.

For when you want high coverage, low maintenance, grassy-meadow, cottagecore garden, and perennial, it's hard to pass up the Inland Sea Oat for its soft, upright nature and the way it moves in the wind. This grassy element will not only help to open up the ground to make space for the roots of the Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree, but it also acts as a lovely ground cover.  

It has the additional benefit of attracting birds throughout the winter to your landscape or garden, who will feed on the seeds of this easy-to-grow grass, which is helpful if you don't plan on harvesting the seed heads. Since the Inland Sea Oats plant spreads readily from rhizomes and from reseeding, it may be a good idea to cut the seed heads for flower arrangements or table decor, otherwise, leaving the seeds for the birds may benefit wildlife, but may also overcrowd your garden bed with additional plants.

Another wonderful tropical accent, red banana plants with their varying coloring means that you can either have red pseudostems, red colored leaves, or for a variegated banana plant, there are stripes and dashes of red in the leaves and pseudostems of the plants. Because banana plants come in so many different sizes, they can make wonderful background companion plants for the Coral bark Japanese Maple Tree for a contrasting look that combines majestic forest and tropical jungle or, using smaller banana plants in the foreground of your Japanese Maple Tree to frame and draw attention to the beautiful colored barked of your specimen tree.

A wonderful, perennial herb that is native to warmer areas, Beijing grass is a beautiful choice for a bright green, grassy appearing plants that tolerates shade and is being grown in some places with very mild winters. Otherwise, Beijing grass will need to be dug up and brought in to overwinter as a houseplant or, simply grown as an annual and replanted every year. Because these grassy blades are edible, they provide a healthy source of greenery to any garden or landscape, combining beauty and functionality in the garden. 

An excellent companion plant for the Coral Bark Japanese Maple Tree for supporting wildlife and birds who can also have a nibble on this grassy plant for a delicious meal throughout the summer.