Fungi on plum tree - had it?

Hi Folks,

We moved into a new house about 18 months ago. There are three trees in the garden - plum, cherry and apple. Both sides of the garden were lleylandi, I've removed one side but not finished on the other. The shade from this caused moss building in the garden and keeps it cold/damp over winter.

We moved in at the end of July, the plum tree showed some signs of problems with one of the bigger branches where the leaves weren't doing too well but it seemed alright and produced fruit.

2016 it produced fruit but other branches didn't look very good either and they lost their leaves early on.

Last week I went out and say fungi growing up the main trunk. In the photo I have attached you can see it goes up some of the larger branches - these are the ones that seemed to die off early on in 2016.

I've done a bit of reading and not found anything good so I'm really looking for confirmation that this should come out of the ground sooner rather than later to prevent any risk to the cherry tree.

There are some smaller plum saplings in the ground where the lleylandi came out (somehow approximately 10 or so had managed to survive without much light!). Most of those were removed and passed on to other people if they survived being taken out of the ground but there are a couple that I left in and want to train as espaliers along with pears and a hazel. They're all fairly small at the moment.

I don't want to go ripping out the big tree if I can help it, it is the one that I actually wanted out of the three big ones in the garden but if it is a hazard it has to go..

 

Welcome to Gardeners Corner

Blimey, with that many fruiting bodies the mycelium must be right thru the tree, looks like it's on its last legs

 

Cheers for the reply, its really weird - there was no fungi on it at all since we moved in. I swear there was nothing there last time I went out and dug up the last of the parsnips on Christmas day so they've grown really quickly. We've been away a couple of days so I should really go and see how much they've grown.

If it has to come out, from what I've read no other similar trees to be put in to replace it and a veg patch or grassing over for a few years is about the best that can be done. Question is, do I need to dig up all the roots as far as I can go or should I chop it right down now and leave the roots?

I'm likely to be hiring a stump grinder at some point to deal with the huge row of lleylandi that is coming out, one side of those stumps is a concrete path and the other is the neighbours lawn. I don't fancy trying to dig them out!

 

What you're seeing there is just the fruiting bodies, the mycellium has probably been eating the wood for years.

It's not Honey fungus so I wouldn't be too worried about digging it all out. Spores are everywhere in the atmosphere, so they probably got in when it was pruned.

That makes sense not to put a replacement there for some years though

 

I'd not bother with the plum "saplings", most probably suckers from the roots of the old plum tree.
As such they are unlikely to produce worthwhile fruit.

 

I didn't think it was honey fungus from the pictures I've seen. I wasn't able to find anything that looked exactly like it as these are mostly black disks. Some of them have the edges curling in with a furry white coating. I wondered if they were young turkey tail or something similar.

I suspect the tree was damaged the year before we moved in. The house was empty for a year, the sellers said that year it produced so many fruit that some branches broke off. As soon as I got in I removed the old dried fruit that was still there but I guess it was too late, someone else had dealt with the broken branches but the biggest one hasn't healed properly and something has been boring into it this year.

Regarding the saplings. Some of these are quite a distance from the tree and when they were removed they had their own roots and did not track back to any larger ones from the main tree. I dug very deep around them as I was getting out the Lleylandi root balls so I'm confident they aren't attached to the main tree. I also cleared out many discarded plum stones so I suspect the previous owner used to hide the fallen plums by shoving them under the Lleylandi. There were also gooseberry, holly, hawthorn, elder and many other things doing the same. Some of those I've kept, others I've passed on and some didn't survive coming out of the ground.

They certainly have the same type of leaves and colour of branches as the new growth this year on the main plumb tree. I've nothing to replace them with so I'll likely leave them them at least for now. If they don't produce fruit I can swap them out with something else at a later date.

Do you think this kind of fungi would be a danger to trees like cobnuts? I've a small one of those and can pick up extra ones very cheap from a garden centre nearby

 

Worth a go if you think they're from seed and not suckers, you might not get the same type of plum though.

Don't know if it'd go for cob nuts too

 

I still think that if they are seedling trees they are unlikely to bear fruit that will be anything like an actual named plum variety, but who knows one or two might turn out OK.

That type of fungus often only attacks dead wood, I dont see it as a killer myself,(might be wrong), I've got similar on a few stumps around my garden that are just quietly decaying away.