Any idea what may be happening?

what about cold damage... i had frost freeze warning last week... just a couple hundred miles due east of you???

you dont need PBucket anymore.. you can load pix directly from your hard drive... using the photo button below the box you type in ....

ken

Thanks Ken. I began thinking, maybe my lawn company sprayed too close to the tree? I am worried as they sprayed this morning too. I have had horrible weeds this year and have a service that takes care if my lawn. I think I will ask all future spraying be far away from my woody plants. The magnolia we planted just a little away does not have any curling though. Thanks for the heads up about posting pictures, I will use the built in uploader next time.

This helped me too - my birch has curling leaves - last year did the same thing. The second flush of leaves was better. Again this year, curling leaves......we did have frost on Friday though....hard frost, nipped at my hostas too.

No improvement yet. Contacted the nursery and the guy there said he wasn't sure but it may be the cold weather we had. Even though it didn't frost, it could of damaged. He said to wait and see if the leaves improve. As long as they don't brown and fall, he said the tree appeared to be healthy. I will follow up if the condition changes.

I would like to know the outcome. I also live in the Chicagoland area (just west of O'Hare) and have a Katsura tree. Mine has been in place for awhile (10+years) but I don't remember it experiencing any of the symtoms your tree is displaying. Cold was never an issue for it and as for drainage Katsura trees are almost as demanding of water as river birches. They will drop their leaves at first sign off water deprivation so be sure to keep your tree well watered during our hot and usually dry summer. Good luck with your tree. Katsuras are one of the most beautiful trees you can have in your landscape.

Katsura have a rep for being a little difficult to transplant. Your tree looks pretty big, so I would not be surprised if it is going through some transplant shock, to go along with the temperature swings. I did not see any transplant shock with mine, but they were 3' container-grown plants with all of the roots intact at planting time. Agree with felisar that you don't want to let the tree go more than three or four days without water or rain during its first summer. Also, you probably already have this taken care of, but a healthy sized mulch-ring will be particularly important for a tree like this as well - they have pretty shallow roots that would not compete well with grass.

Yes, it was a 12ft tree when I planted it. I dove far to find one and the larger tree was the only one that I could find with a nice straight trunk. I searched for weeks and decided this was the best one. My wife and I got in over our heads as planting this on our own was hard. I rented a truck from home Depot and needed to hire a few guys off of Facebook to help me roll it off the truck. The ball was so large, I would never do it again.

It was planted in August last year, so it may be some shock. I have a large mulch ring and it honestly has rained a ton. The nursery said it no longer required water except for dry periods where once a week watering would suffice. I also have a pop up gutter right outside the mulch ring where the water from the gutter comes out and provides ample water for the tree. Here is a couple pictures from last year, I really love the tree. I will try to post some new pictures tomorrow.

Mine was about that size and the nursery planted it for me. It took 3 men and a backhoe. The rootball was probably 3 feet across - not a do it yourself job. I had it done in early April when the nurserry was offering free planting. At the same time they planted 2 large Adams crabapples and a clump sunset maple (all still alive and well). Since the planting fee is usually a big percentage of the tree cost I wanted to take full advantage of the offer.

Nice looking tree.

Here is the Katsura tree this morning.

That's a really nice looking one for sure. You can tell from the yellowing leaves in the pics from last August that it had decent transplant shock. I planted my Katsura late October 2012 when it was dormant. Spring of '13 it leafed out really good but 1/3 of the leaves quickly yellowed and fell off. Mine also had a few bad sun scald marks on it with exposed heartwood. I cut a few branches off to lessen the load on the roots and it made it through that summer. Last year it did great and grew about 6-8", same thing so far this year. I haven't gotten any decent fall foliage from it yet but it's definitely a much healthier tree now. I do water it when it's dry. It's also healing over the damaged areas. Hopefully this year it will be all healed over. Anyway, Katsuras aren't for the weak at heart. Beautiful trees indeed, but as someone else said, they are not the easiest to start out. I would even expect it to take longer than the standard 3 years for these trees to start growing at their full strength.

Thanks for letting me know. I had no idea they were this finicky. I saw some pictures of the tree and said, that's what I want to replace my ash tree I had to cut down.