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It looks like it could be Canker to me. Best treatment would be to remove the area's affected by pruning back to healthy material. Check the open wound to see if you can see any diease (brown middle) & if so cut back to the next bud & check again.
This would apply to any sort of diease. I hope you don't have to remove too much of the tree.
Make sure you burn the material you remove.
Thanks for your input Neil thats really helpful
I think you're right Jo, fire blight but some canker there as well which isn't unusual because fire blight often develops from canker and vice versa. As Neil says cutting back is the way to go, preventing infection of the roots. If the roots get infected the tree is lost. It spreads easily and very fast in the weather conditions we have been having recently.
In the Summer of 1976 my grandfather lost a huge number of trees on the family Apple farm in Essex due to fire blight.
Thanks Jim. Don’t suppose you know if a cherry tree close by is likely to contract fireblight? She has a cherry tree with many dead leaves on although the branches look ok at the minute, it’s s taller tree so harder for me to access. Dilemma is she’d rather get rid of the infected tree than have it spread to other things! I’ll cut out the dead initially and see how it goes. Thanks again.
The cherry can't contract fireblight or canker from the apples. The cherry can get a different strain of canker and you will see lots of holes in the leaves. Fireblight affects things like hawthorn and pyracantha so you could check the garden for these. How much of the tree has it affected? Canker spreads more slowly entering through wounds and a tree can live with it for many years whereas fireblight will affect the whole tree more quickly.
Thanks James, my client will be pleased to hear the cherry tree can’t contract the same disease. I will have a check around the garden for any hawthorn or pyracantha issues, but I didn’t notice any problems on my last visit. There were probably about 10 branches effected severely, dead from the very top of the tree about two thirds down towards the trunk, so I have pruned off now into the healthy looking wood. There are a few smaller branches closer to the trunk that also look to have been affected. So the majority of the tree still looks ok at the minute. My client said the tree was fine last year. It’s not a huge tree and it is very old.
they used to use chestnut compound on the fresh cut branches abd a tar spray in winter for apple trees i do not know if you can still get them or even if its legal to use them ?
Thanks David I’ll have a look into these products
At one time, you would apply "Arbrex" to cuts, but the modern thinking is that it traps pathogens and causes issues, and at the end of the day, trees have been perfectly capable of sorting themselves out for millions of years... :-)
Jo, I'm pretty sure it will not spread to a Cherry. That said there are a quite a few other trees and shrubs it can spread to. If the customer is suggesting getting rid of the whole tree I would definitely go along with that because it's so difficult to get rid of completely that you may well be going through the same thing again next Spring.
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