Schefflera taiwaniana (台湾鹅掌柴) is a new evergreen shrub from high mountains of Taiwan. The unique thing about this elegant beauty is that it is much hardier than your typical house plant Scheffleras (S. arboricola and S. actinophylla ). Now Monrovia Nursery may have been too optimistic to give it a cold tolerance rating of USDA Zone 7, which is 0F or -17.8C, but judging by the reports from zone-pushing gardeners in UK, it is at least good to about 20F. So it should be great as a tropicalesque backdrop for most Bay Area gardens.
It was Dan Hinkley the renowned plant explorer who first brought this plant back to the U.S., but while his fellow collector from UK has had it available at Crug Farm Nursery for quite some time (For plant lovers, it is painful to see many other exciting Schefflera species exclusively available there), Schefflera taiwaniana never went into trade here. A certain large seed company may played a part when they bought Dan’s independent nursery, Heronswood, and subsequently moved it to the East Coast.
The fortune has finally changed a couple years ago, when Monrovia and Dan teamed up to offer a line of collector plants including S. taiwaniana. It is scheduled to be widely released in spring 2012, but a few plants has gotten out last year (2010) and it caused quite a stir among serious gardeners in the Pacific Northwest.
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