Plant disease

Hello everybody, hopefully one of you can help me. I have got the plant below and it seems to have developed a disease. Unfortunately the plant was already there when we bought the house so I am not sure what sort of plant it is.

Would anybody be able to identify the plant and then tell me if the grey bits (furry) on the second photo are a disease or not. And if it is a disease what we can do about it.

Many thanks.

 

Hi CEJM, Your plant is laurel. They can be a bit susceptible to powdery mildew when under stress.It's a bit difficult to tell from the photo if that is the problem or whether it might be an insect infestation such as mealy bug. If the 'fluff' is on the stems it's more likely to be the latter.
Give the shrub a feed of balanced fertiliser and a good soak if it's dry at the roots. If the fluff rubs off and leaves a red stain, you could soak the ground with a watering can-ful or two of a systemic insecticide. Contact sprays don't have much effect on insects that protect themselves under a woolly coat.

 

Thank you very much for your quick reply. We will give that a go.

Rubbing the fluff off leaves no red stain so that is good. I will keep you updated.

 

Hi CEJM. What you have there is wooly aphid on your Pyracantha. Have a look at this link it may help.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardeningadvice/8838969/How-do-I-get-rid-of-woolly-aphids.html

you may be able to prune out some of the most affected branches

 

Dammit, now I look again with a renewed sense of scale, I'm sure you're right, scillonian! It's strange, though, that there's no staining when the insects are crushed?...
Time to cut down on the aperos, methinks

 

Thank you both! Had a look on the link provided and on the Internet and that very much looks like what we got.

At least now we also know what grown in almost 70% of our garden.

I think hat we go for a combination of cutting out some of the effected branches and some spraying of insectiside. Unfortunately the effected area is about a third up from the ground and if we cut all effected branches out then this leaves us with very little of the plant left.