You can picture one surface that refuses to stay a single colour. A leaf is green, and then cream breaks in along the edge, or yellow splashes across the middle. From a distance it is one leaf; up close it is clearly two or three things at once. That is the whole word: one object, not uniform inside itself. When English carries the picture off the plant, the colours turn into kinds — one crowd, one career, one street, with many different sorts packed inside.
From the word’s history
The packet's Wiktionary entry gives variegated as variegate + -ed, tracing back through Late Latin variegō to Latin varius, 'spotted, of many kinds'. The same varius stands behind various and variety, so 'more than one kind' sits inside the word from the start.
資料裡的 Wiktionary 說明寫的是 variegate 加 -ed，往前經過晚期拉丁文 variegō，回到拉丁文 varius（有斑點的、各式各樣的）。同一個 varius 也是 various 和 variety 的源頭。所以「不只一種」這個意思，從一開始就在字裡面。
Wiktionary, "variegated"
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