My umbrella plant (a gold capella to be specific) has been dropping leaves like madness over the past month or so, I got this thing sometime at the start of summer.

I've tried more light, less light, more water, less water, can't figure it out.

Currently I'm back to my original treatment of it, watering once a week, keeping it in a corner with low filtered sunlight.

Nothing has worked.

http://www.ourhouseplants.com/plants/umbrella-plant-schefflera

*skatin' the rings of saturn*


..and miles to go before i sleep...

I don't have any but my folks have had two for as long as I remember and they don't do shit with them other than put 'em outside in the late spring and bring 'em in mid-fall. I know in summer they keep one of them in a spot where the hose doesn't even reach.

Stick it outside somewhere, filtered light. If it's in a plastic pot, sink the pot in the ground a bit. Bring the plant indoors in the mid-fall, when temperatures get down to 50 or so at night.

It will lose the lower branches as a regular part of growing - it does want to be more of a shrub or small tree - and if I'm not mistaken they can put on a pretty good bit of growth in a year. So maybe what you're seeing is normal.

Other thing you might want to do is pull it out of the pot and check the roots, make sure it's not super root bound as it grows.

As I understand it, they don't need much of anything - they take poor soil, drought conditions, a variety of light conditions, whatever. If you leave it indoors, the tried and true tactic of watering it thoroughly when it's dry, then waiting until it is dry again (dry, not sort-of-dry or I-can't-really-tell-if-it's-dry) before watering thoroughly again. Most houseplants don't like to be constantly wet, and a lot of houseplant owners get into trouble because they think of watering the plants as a function of time instead of a function of how wet or dry the plant is. Even with the variabilities of soil, light, pot size, how rootbound it might be, etc., very few houseplants need to be watered every day.

I've generally been watering them once a week, but I like how you described dry, because I'm not sure sometimes whether it's truly dry or not.

We live in an apartment where there's really no good place to put it outside.

The pot has draining holes, and its never sitting in a puddle of water (I actually set it up to sit on a 2-foot high iron grid-like platform with a pan on the floor to catch any drippings.)

Interesting note: Lately most of the yellow spots have been fading to green like the rest of the leaf.

Have you fertilized your plant? And by fertilizer, I mean something other than chemicals (Miracle Grow, etc). That stuff will pollute your soil over time.

The leaves are always yellow in spots.

I've never fertilized it. Been watering on avg once a week. Leaves are just falling like crazy. Often they go brown first, but sometimes they look great and just fall off anyway.