Hey all. This is a schefflera I brought to a workshop Jerry Meislik provided for the Iowa Bonsai Association this summer (middle of August I believe) in Des Moines. I'd cut it back hard over the winter from a houseplant in a greenhouse and we cut it down to what you see here then repotted when I got home. This picture was taken about a month later, September 19th. It has some goofy stuff going on still like the two side by side similar sized aerial roots and the subsection of the tree on the top right that kinda looks like it's copping a squat on the rest of the tree but after overworking and killing so many other trees it was very gratifying to cut so much off a tree, defoliate it, then cut off 90% of the roots then have it bounce back like this. Still has a ways to go but for an Iowa grown tropical I think it's doing quite nicely.
Jerry was a great person to learn from. He was friendly, funny, and excelled at getting his message across to all of us in the class. Some of the material people brought kinda made me cringe (with reason I think, tropicals aren't exactly all the rage in zone 5), I wasn't all that proud of this schefflera, but he devoted his full attention to every tree and the person working with them.