Wild Peach - disease identification

[DuncanM]

Came across this wild Peach earlier on in the summer and ate one of its delicious fruit, but noticed a significant amount of the tree looks dead without any leaf cover. I've attached pics of the fungus/disease in the hope of identifying it and in the hope that pruning, however hard may mean this tree can survive.


Help much appreciated

[ameno]

It's a bracket fungus of some sort, but I'm not sure I could say which. There are a lot of them.
Some bracket fungi are pathogenic, but others only attack the dead wood, so will not kill a tree directly, although they can still kill a tree indirectly by rotting out the heartwood (which is already dead), thus making the trunk weaker and liable to topple over in storms.

Either way, though, I doubt there is anything you can do to remove it. Since the brackets are so close to the trunk, it is probably growing inside the trunk itself.
Trees can often live many years with bracket fungi, though, so it's not necessarily going to die any time soon.

Also, is that growing wild here in the UK? And fruiting, too? If so, that's quite impressive.

[DuncanM]

It surprised me just as much when I found it, it's around the Guildford area. Even more impressive was the fact they ripened with a terrible summer.

Thanks for the advice on the fungus

[ameno]

Even more impressive was the fact they ripened with a terrible summer.

I wouldn't say that part is necessarily so surprising. Peaches are naturally early ripening. In warm countries, early varieties can be ready as soon as late June, so even in our cooler country they should ripen some time in August.
More surprising is that the tree itself grew to such a good size all on its own, that it wasn't crippled and stunted by peach leaf curl, and that the blossoms survived late frosts.