Gary, I would say the tree is in shock from its sudden change. The only concrete thing you can do at this point is to erect a shade barrier and keep it up for a few weeks while the roots adapt. Just put a sheet on the southern side with some poles to block the direct sunlight for those few weeks. Cherries are northern climate trees genetically and can have difficulty with strong sun. Scott

Your soil appears to be quite alkaline and this makes the leaves turn light green to yellow, except for the leaf veins which remain dark green. I suggest you amend the soil with products which will acidify it. Some examples are garden Sulphur, green sand, aluminum sulfate, iron sulfate or liquid iron chelated compounds. The first ones are slow acting and the liquids help correct iron chlorosis faster (although it still will take a while to correct the look of the leaves). Most nurseries will hopefully carry one or several of these. Other products that will acidify very little but which are still good choices are coffee grounds and even vinegar diluted in water (but vinegar breaks down easily and needs tto be reapplied very often so, being lazy, I would go with the other products. Another suggestion is to apply 3-4" of mulch up to the drip line of the plant so the soil remains as evenly moist as possible. The mulch will also maintain the soil moist for longer periods so you do not have to water often. Acidic mulch like pine needles and such will help acidify the topmost part of the soil only so feel free to use other muulches like straw or hardwood mulch. The soil in the picture looks dry so try to maintain the soil moist as evenly as possible. Try not to have periods of dry soil, followed by periods of wet/moist soil, followed again by periods of dry soil & so forth. Give the plant about 1/2 gallon to 1 gallon of water early in the mornings. Water the soil and not the leaves. To help determine when to water, try using the finger method.... Early in the mornings and for 2-3 weeks daily, insert a finger into the soil to a depth of about 4". If the soil feels dry or almost dry then water. Otherwise, do not water. Every time that you water, write a note in a wall calendar indicating that you watered on that day. After 2-3 weeks, look at the notes and determine how often you are watering. If you watered -for example- every 3 days, set your sprinkler to water 1 gallon of water every 3 days. If the temperatures change 10 degress in either direction or if you enter a period when you receive a lot of rain (or no rain), retest for another 2-3 weeks. Since your growing season is so long, consider trying some of the reblooming hydrangeas too! Nikko will bloom once per year and it is kind of nice to get brand new blooms now and then. I visited the tropics during Xmas and was usually greeted by brown blooms in the Hortensias. Luis

I don't know where you're located, but if it's at all hot, you might also consider rigging up a temporary shade structure over it, and mist the leaves frequently with a hose. If the leaves have really gotten damaged you may lose some or all of them, but don't give up on the tree if that happens. Chances are, it will still have enough energy to grow new leaves and recover.

But [a surfactant] does NOTHING to reduce or counteract compaction! It cannot recreate pore space. This is a well-recognized concept with any soil scientist as is fully explained by soil physics. You cannot fully explain soil science with physics or even physics and chemistry, as any soil scientist can tell you. Pores are created by roots, worms, fungi, arthropods, and microarthropods, not physics or chemistry. Once the surfactant restores percolation and allows water down to where the soil temperatures are cooler, the environment changes to favor the biology, and the biological population explosion does the work of opening pores in the soil. Somehow [home gardeners] meager anecdotal experience makes them more knowledgeable than specialists in the field. How does that work?? So you're dismissing the numerous university studies of surfactants already done (many years ago), showing that they are as effective as core and tine aeration? How does that work? Here's how home gardener dismissal of your phantom science works. You don't have the science you claim to have. For whatever reason(s), the specialists refuse to spend 50 cents to try an experiment on their lawn. Perhaps the reason is that they only do science when someone else pays for it. We're willing to pay for it ourselves. Big Shampoo has yet to realize their products are being used in the garden, so they have not funded the universities to quantify the results. Even when scientists try to make things work, you can end up with the Iowa State fiasco regarding corn gluten meal as an effective organic preemergent weed control. For those who read the research instead of the marketing, their research shows the best they could do was 80% weed control, and that was not repeatable. Eighty percent still leaves a yard full of weeds even under their ideal circumstances. Then they patented the product and we have to pay more for CGM than we used to. So basically we home gardeners are trying things that the universities have not tried (yet). We are not necessarily more knowledgeable, but we might have more experience with some ideas then they are. When we find something that seems to work, we farm it out to our peers for review...our peers being other home gardeners. We don't have the resources to do a large scale, randomized, double blind, placebo controlled, project. All we have is peers. So ours is not scientific evidence, but when a few peers adds up to lots of peers having success, then we might throw it out there for others to try. I'm not calling the Earth flat. I'm trying to help solve a problem common to lawns. Are you a scientist with clear scientific evidence, clear statistical results, proving I am wrong? You can sit there and postulate things until you're blue in the face, but until you try it and make your own observation, I'm more skeptical of you than I am of those reporting success. Do we make mistakes? Sure. I used to tout ordinary cornmeal as a universal antifungal product for lawns. It turns out cornmeal is not universal, but it seems to work only in St Augustine lawns. It has no effect in cool season grass. I don't have any research, but I have lots of people reporting back with pros and cons thanking me for suggesting cornmeal to recover a diseased lawn.