I was very upset when I spotted honey fungus on my beautiful Japanese Quince (Chaenomeles japonica) a couple of weeks ago:
As regular readers will know, this is an ongoing problem on one side of my garden. Chaenomeles is on the Royal Horticultural Society's list of "Plants rarely recorded as being affected by honey fungus" so although it's right next to the origin of the fungus I had hoped that it would survive.
As it is I couldn't leave the plant and hope for the best because this would risk spreading the infection further, so the plant had to go. I removed bot the plant itself and as much as possible of the roots and burned them in an incinerator. Unfortunately removing all of the roots simply isn't possible. In my heavy, clay soil I can only dig down around two feet at which depth the tap root still was still quite thick, clearly it must go quite a lot further down:
My next step will be to lay down some pond liner around the infected area to try to stop it from spreading further.
I also took some cuttings from apparently healthy parts of the Quince in the hope of producing a new, healthy plant so that I have not lost it entirely. It's been one of my favourites for years and it would be nice to see it blooming again. So far they seem healthy and have a few shoots so fingers crossed!