I grow Jet Trail and Low and White. They are some of my favorite shrubs. They bloom so early and are just so beautiful. My Jet Trail makes fruit every year, the others don't. I have never used the fruit, though they say it makes good jelly. I find them to be easy to grow, carefree, undemanding shrubs. The biggest mistake you can make with them is shearing them into odd shapes. Then they just look like a pile of sticks. Let them grow in their natural form and only remove entire branches that detract from the plant appearance.

Hi @ken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5 - I definitely HATE my quince and have a deep burning desire to KILL it - have been battling it for years. The roots go straight down way more than 2 ft. Every time a shoot pops up, I TRY digging it out as deep as I can (maybe 2ft+, cut the root, and pour boiling water on the cut root). And, the roots don't always seem like they are going back to the original trunk location - they just to STRAIGHT down, and I can't even pull them out after digging 2+ft. The original bush grew right next to a stone wall and I cut it back as best I could and tried pouring pots of broiling water on it multiple times to try to kill the stump next to the wall. Some branches burn and die back, but this thing won't die. My next step is to disassemble the stone wall and try to dig out the stump as deep as I can go, but the stones are HUGE and this is going to be a real project to disassemble and re-stack. These shoots keep popping up within 10ft of the original location, and just don't stop. Any other ideas besides grenades, or a lighting a pit of gasoline around it? It's been home to giant wasps nests hidden in it's branches, has painful thorns, and doesn't die - it's just an evil plant that's ruining my garden and my life!

I really love quince trees. The shrubs seem to hold their flowers for a long time here. I can't recall if I've told this here or not, but I planted a quince tree out near the road in a sort of guerilla gardening fit of madness a few years back. The city planted a horrible maple out there, despite my cries of protest. So, clad in traditional black, I crept out one dawn and replaced the maple with the quince. Wouldn't you know, a city rep came out and queried us about the switch. We could honestly say "the tree" had been hit by a car (true, the quince was in fact hit by a car a couple of days later, so I replanted it and lugged stones out to surround it. We find those stones several yards away from the tree sometimes. The tree is OFF the road, we guess people are trying to park on it.). So, I'm probably on some black list the city forester keeps. I skipped a neighborhood watch meeting when he came to give a talk, sure that he would see me and say "YOU!" Quince trees suffer a little from the humidity here and I haven't even tried to spray mine. Even if the fruit is too buggy to eat, it still smells nice and the flowers are gorgeous in the spring. My tree keeps its leaves until very late in the year also. And, it won't grow up into the power lines, unlike some maples I could mention. Happy birthday, by the way! I see I missed it. kent

The dieback would probably be a bacterial blight, rose family plants in general prone to such things (and others). The second thing sounds like tent caterpillar egg masses. These like rose family plants as well.