Schefflera taiwaniana

I've a bit of a thing for members of Araliaceae, a love affair, an obsession you could say, but on one proviso, they have to be hardy (for the most part) to get a place in my garden. Another criteria that they must meet is to look exotic or be somewhat different from the norm, it's all the better for me if they look like they hail from some sub tropical woodland perched on a mountainside in some far off land.....

Step forward the beautiful Schefflera taiwaniana.

Here's a plant that ticks all the boxes, unusual and certainly exotic in its looks, with gorgeous evergreen leaves like an umbrella that's been through a hurricane with only the spokes left intact.

It's the hardy but refined cousin of that neglected umbrella plant (Schefflera arboricola) that grew in  the corner of your mother's bathroom during the eighties, well my mother's anyway. Yet this plant just has an elegant poise that its indoor dwelling relation lacks.

Look at the lightly fuzzy new growth in late spring, like little greyish shuttlecocks, gorgeous eh?

and then they green up, lose the fuzzy indumentum and gain that poise that I was talking about, see what I mean?

Just look at the size of the leaves, with the obligatory hand in the shot for scale.

My plant originally grew in a pot for three or so years but consisted of one stem that just kept going straight up, with a tuft of leaves at the top. 

Scheffleras can be prone to beanpolelikeness, they go straight up, heading for the sky as they're generally woodland understory plants and want to head up towards the light. This is not what I wanted from my plant, so before planting it out I took a drastic step. I approached it with my heart in my mouth and with secateurs held in a slightly unsteady hand, with relative ease I sliced through the pithy stem, chopping it down to about six inches from the base. 

It responded admirably, with new growth breaking from various buds on the stem. Now I've got a beautiful shrubby specimen with six or so branches growing in dry shade beneath a large Acer pseudoplatanus, how many plants that you can grow in dry shad look as hot as this??

It also survived two brutal (brutal for a normally mild coastal garden in Ireland) that decimated all my tree ferns, reducing them to oozing stumps. It sat there, not blinking an eyelid at the baltic temperatures.

....it is, in my opinion, stunning.