Here is another office plant that needed a makeover. When ordering some furniture to be donated to our Seattle office, I noticed there were plants on offer, as well, so I figured at the very least I would end up with some free big pots–I asked for two plants. When the plants landed, one was an impressive 5′ tree of Schefflera arboricola–cultivar “Dwarf Gold” or maybe “Gold Capella”.

We had the furniture and plants delivered into the unheated parking garage of our building, then we hired movers to take the stuff up to our suite. Somehow, they missed this big tree and left it in the garage, where it stayed overnight (it was August, so not a problem with freezing). I moved it up the next day and shoved it into my office.

Above is how the tree looked when it arrived. It was big and bushy. You can see a big lump in the main stem about halfway up. It might be a graft point, or maybe just scarring from bad pruning.

I was so excited to get this amazing plant, but it wasn’t without its challenges. It arrived smothered in soft scale insects and started losing leaves because it was so infested. Part of me thought I should just huck it in a dumpster and clean the pot up and reuse it. But it seemed worth giving it a chance, so I took the extreme measure of pruning all the branches way back, removing all the foliage, and scrubbing the branches with a rough sponge and soapy water to get any remaining scale off. I wasn’t particularly hopeful that I actually got all the scale (it was SO badly infested). And the tree looked like a dead skeleton for a few weeks. My coworkers gave me sympathetic looks and expressed a fair amount of concern for my mental health. But then, after a couple of weeks, the old wood started to break with new growth buds and the tree leafed out really quickly after that.

Here the plant is starting to leaf back out. Below is an even closer photo.

Since these photos, the tree has leafed out fully. It is responding well to regular watering and feeding. So far, the nasty scale insects have not reappeared, but I expect they will come back at some point so I’m watching them closes and I’ll be sure to wash them off before they become a problem.