What am I losing when I see individual color clipping in Camera Raw?

Question

I hope this is the right place to leave this question as it's probably more about color than a technical question about PS. I have enough knowledge of color theory to be dangerous, as they say.
I am adjusting some landscape images taken in RAW mode with a Nikon D200.
In Camera Raw, as I draw the black slider to the right, I see clipping of blue channel before the image looks adjusted properly for contrast. With the option key down, large blocks of yellow appear before black appears, and I assume that also means the blues are being clipped. The only place I see that clipping is areas of green foliage.
Deep blue skies are not showing clipping and neither are other obvious blues in the images.
When I adjust Camera Raw's black slider to the point where I get full shadow clipping (black shows up with the Option key down), back off slightly, and then look at the image's channels in PS, I see the blue channel is all blocked up.
I understand (or think I understand) that the weak channel carries detail...yet I really can't see any difference in foliage detail whether the blue channel is clipped or not.
I am not clear about what I am doing, and I am also not clear whether this is a result of the rendering of certain greens by my camera. I know from experience that manipulations of yellows in later processing seems to affect foliage colors more than manipulation of greens. Saturation of foliage is affected far more by selecting "yellows" in the saturation adj layer dropdown box than by selecting greens.

Answer 1

Thanks, everyone.
Opening the image in ProPhoto colorspace completely eliminates the blue clipping. When I compare two instances of an image in PS after assigning ProPhoto in ACR for one and Adobe RGB in ACR for the other, I see much more detail in the blue channel of the image in PS.
Yes, then this is a good lesson on gamut clipping and colorspace.
I tried the workaround but it's much easier to just work in a larger colorspace.