What do you mean, "catches cold?" Do you mean was left out in cold weather? If so, then yes, cut back to non-seared stems, then give it good, bright indirect light and damp-ish soil to let it recover (it should regrow leaves fairly easily as the stems on schefflera are perfectly capable of photosynthesizing and even the wood can do so to a more limited extent). You can place the plant directly into a room-temperature environment, it won't mind the sudden change very much.

Growth will be slow during late winter, mine's sitting and doing not much of anything right now except from the Christmas lights that were on it.

If this is a disease I've never heard of, I'll need more information, but others are probably already familiar with it and will chime in directly. :-)

Yeah, I left it out in the cold for too long and it started to die, I left a picture there of what I did to prune

Yeah, that's not promising. I'm not going to say to give up on it--I've seen worse, including a plant that baked in a car for two days in summer once and that I was asked to rescue. It took a while, but the core of the root system was still alive.

Like I said, keep damp-ish, in a bright area. If those two last stubs are deadwood, remove them. If they're even faintly alive, let them go. And just hope for the best while you keep an eye on it. If it shows green, you can start treating it like a plant again--and I think it'll be more likely to resprout from the soil or the lowest part of the wood than anything else. But I sure could be wrong on that one.

Right now, it's shocked and very unhappy, but it should recover fast; shefflera aren't the sort that go dormant, as such, and really require temperatures over sixty degrees. Restore that and, if it's going to, growth should hopefully resume...

I'll try my best to take care of it, hopefully it stays, but if not I can just get another one. At least I wont make the same mistake

Taking all the bark off the remaining stems was not a good move. That could seriously limit the plant's ability to bounce back easily, if at all, from the cold damage it suffered.

That's good to know, it feel really mushy so I thought it was just toxic, I'm assuming that mushyness meant it was trying to heal itself then?

If you trimmed off dead leaves and dead stems, that's fine, so any branches and stems that were mushy and you cut and removed, that was the right thing to do. Shefflera branches should always be quite firm, unless they're just the tiny little sprouting bits (and even those are pretty firm, actually).

I can't really tell from the above photo (my eyes not being that great), but if those were just the last two branches left that felt solid and you didn't peel of the bark, you're fine. If you did, well, what's done is done and it may be fine. If it came off easily, you might get sprouts from lower down on the branches. If not, hopefully from the crown at the base of the soil.

To me, it looks like those were just the two little branches left after cutting back, and the shefflera in question was never all that big to begin with. Mine's 3 years old and I don't force or really encourage it, and it's only 4 feet tall with a few sub-branches, so that's entirely possible.

I did cut off the bad branches, the mushiness was in between the bark in the current stems that are there, I just figured it was rotting and I should clean it,

They seem solid and they are still wood coloured and not white. I'll keep an eye on it and throw out updates if anyone doesnt know if this will work.

It's also a 6 year old plant, I repotted it twice but I never had this living situation where it couldnt get much sun in, which is why I risked it outside on a 4 degree celcius

That's odd. It actually should have been marginally OK at 4 C as long as there was no frost ('round here, that would be slightly possible at 4 C, but really unlikely as we have no nearby hills or mountains). It doesn't like it, but it won't up and die.

Well, no matter now, what's done has been done. Keep it in good lighting and good conditions and let's watch for sprout. It's possible that sprouts could still arise from growth points on the stems, so leave them for now.

Hi Myles.

I’m just checking my understanding. So, the 2 sticks in your image above are denuded stems where you have removed all of the bark? So we are just looking at the woody part of the stems that was underneath the bark? Is that correct? If so, how far down on the plant did you remove the bark? Is it all gone? All the way down to the soil line? ...or somewhere just above it?

It sounds like the mushiness you described was due to the live plant tissue freezing which resulted in that tissue dying and once it thawed out, it was dead & mushy.

Can you show us a picture of what’s going on further down on the plant closer to the soil?

If there is no bark left from the soil lineup, I don’t know that there would be any advantage to keep bare, denuded sticks. I don’t have this particular plant but with no bark, I don’t think that there would be any growth points for any new growth to sprout from. I feel like if there is any life left in the plant, any new growth would only be possible from some place where the bark hasn‘t been removed, possibly at or just below the soil line.

That being said, and if I’m understanding you correctly, is there any reason to keep those denuded sticks instead of cutting them off at or just above the point where there is no bark?

For those of you who are more familiar with or have this plant, what are your thoughts, please? Am I totally wrong about this?

Edited to add: Never mind about the addl pic. I clicked on the image so it enlarged and I could see the entire image incl the soil. Still need clarification about the bark though.

Yeah I left some bark at the bottom where it felt fine, so far no changes. I'm going to give it a few more days and see what happens

You can cut off any parts where you’ve removed the bark. They're never going to recover. Then cross your fingers. And a few more days isn’t enough to know if it’s going to revive. Try a few weeks to see if it manages to bud from near the base. But I don’t hold out much hope, I’m afraid.