On 10/06/2013 09:20, echinosum wrote:
'Sacha[_10_ Wrote:
;Cotoneasters can be affected by woolly aphid so it might be worth your

looking that up. Hard to tell much from the photo but if it is that,
sprays can be effective.

Unless you actually find some insects, I think it is a waste of money
spraying.

The wood has that sort of look of something in the advanced stages of
death - when there isn't much sap transport the wood has a pinched,
dried up look to it, and yours has that sort of look to it. (Though I
could be quite wrong, maybe it's just the photo.) Things dying of fungal
disease look like that. When they get to that stage, they are generally
unsaveable, unless you can cut back to healthy wood, and you say the
whole plant is affected.

The "frilly" bits of white do look very like lichen, but we'd need a
close up to be sure. But there are other bits of more general white on
the thing, on the small branches, that look more like some kind of
fungus.

Sometimes individual plants do randomly succumb to disease and once it
is advanced there isn't much you can do about it. In general,
cotoneasters are exceedingly robust plants that are very unfussy about
conditions (well maybe they don't like it waterlogged, I've never seem
them tested by that) and need a lot of hacking back to keep them under
control. So, one has (maybe) got fungus and died. I'm forever pulling
volunteer cotoneaster seedlings up, maybe you'll find one that can
replace it. Or maybe the adjacent ones will grow out to fill the gap.




Always amazed at how attractive horizontalis is to bees. Such hard work
for them visiting hundreds of tiny flowers, but I suppose it's a
delicacy for them