Sudden unexplained shrub death

[begonefoulclutter]

Has anyone got any ideas why my berberis bush in the garden might have suddenly gone brown and kicked the bucket? It is right next to several other shrubs including a cotoneaster and a pyracantha, all of which are completely fine and showing no signs of ill health at all.

It was a good size, around a metre tall and wide, and it's been there about 6 years or so.

We had this with a Hawthorn and my neighbours Honeysuckle died at the same time. They were directly in line, so their root systems were probably close or intersecting, ifswim. Neighbour thought it was an underground fungus. Advice was to remove the shrub, and dig out as much of the root as possible.

Alternatives could be insect or severe frost, but Berberis is pretty hardy.

It's happily gone through far more severe frosts than what we've had this last winter, and there's no pest issue at all. It hasn't been waterlogged, it didn't dry out last summer, literally until a fortnight ago there was nothing wrong with it. It was an evergreen variety. All the leaves are still on it and are brown & crispy.

Usually if something's struggling you notice in advance but this is out of nowhere.

It does sound very similar to my Hawthorn shrub. It was about 6 feet tall, and more than 10 years old. I left it, apparently healthy one Sunday, went travelling for work, came back on Friday and it was crispy toast. No freak weather.
So I was inclined to go with my neighbour.

It honestly looks the way you'd think it would if someone had sawn through it at ground level and left it there a week. Either that or sprayed it with Roundup.

I'm really not sure about the fungus thing because all the shrubs are close together, and all their roots would be completely entwined by now, so surely they would be affected as well.

I’ve had this with honey fungus. It makes no sense why some things survive when a shrub/tree has dropped dead right next to them, but it does happen. Sometimes there’s just a delay.

Mine is the same. Along with 3 well established fuschias that got rubbery feeling flowers last year. I’m waiting to see whether anything grows this spring. They’ve been cut right back down but may not have survived. My cotoneaster tree is very sparse and one half looks dead. What’s going on?

Probably honey fungus. If you scrape back the soil around the crown, there might be a strong mushroom smell. Look for the black "bootlaces", running through the soil you might even find them going into the roots. They look like black dead roots but they don't branch in the same way and they feel leathery.

Honey fungus killed off a tree and some of the bushes in our front garden, but skipped other bushes entirely, they didn’t seem to be affected. Maybe it only likes some plants?

Have you ever seen yellowish mushrooms popping up in that area? Even if not the honey fungus can live entirely underground for years.

Best advice - dig out the berberis with the surrounding soil, buy new topsoil, plant one of the kinds of bushes that survived this time there and hope for the best!

I can't dig out the surrounding soil without also digging out a pyracantha, a cotoneaster, a juniper, a lavender, a spiraea, a Scots pine and a load of bluebells. 😂

After posting this thread, I did have a bit of a think about it and we did have the water board doing stuff out there a while ago, so I'm wondering whether they did something to the roots while they were working and it has taken this long to keel over.

I've had the same problem. I'm not sure if mine is completely dead as there are a few green bits. But most of it is dead and brown. Such a shame as it was great.

I'm going to have a good look at it this weekend (when it isn't windy as it's really spiny and I don't want it whipping me round the face 😂), and see whether I can find out what's going on.

Well... against all odds, it's alive!

When I pruned it back down to about a foot, there was no evidence of any disease, and the cut branches were showing green under the bark. There are now signs of new shoots forming.