[Rumandolin]

Hi - I wondered if anyone could help with advice on silverleaf in plums?

I'm asking because I bought a 2 year-old (Opal) plum tree from a garden centre last May. It looked very healthy while it was in the pot, where it stayed for something like three weeks after I bought it. Then, when I planted it, the leaves turned silvery.

I was initially worried this might be silverleaf, though it seemed unlikely. I did some reading around, and convinced myself it was likely 'false silverleaf', caused by the stress of planting. After a while the silvery sheen faded. However, I've just pruned the tree after the first leaves were out - and almost all the branches have brown through them. Most are just in the cores, but near the base of the trunk there's a brown smear through about half of the wood of the branch I removed.

Is it really possible for a 2-year tree already to have well-developed silverleaf? Is it possible it could be something else, or that the tree could recover? Even the trunk has barely reached the 2.5cm diameter the sources I've been able to find say you should look at to see if there's brown discolouration of the wood. However, I don't know if this is because it's rare for silverleaf to show up in limbs narrower than this, or because narrower branches can be expected to have brown in them?

I've also just pruned two 2-year old bare-root trees I planted in February (from a different supplier). They also have brown cores, though no sign of brown outside the cores - at least on the skinny branches I've pruned. Perhaps from ignorance, that all three trees might already have silverleaf at 2 years seems unlikely ...

Stupidly in retrospect, I don't have photos as I wanted rid of the cut branches ASAP and I wanted to get the cuts painted as soon as I could.

Any advice much appreciated!