If it's just one year in the ground, the "wimpy ness" could be that it is still recovering from transplanting.

Are you watering it properly?

The other damage could be the hail, or several bugs.

My first thought was hail, too. Looks like a couple of the leaves have been torn.

looks mechanical to me... hail ...

there is nothing to do about it all ...

but to water it properly ... and i am not sure lawn watering is good enough ...

ken

Last year after transplant it got extra water. Watered a bit during winter because it's so dry here. Now it's getting watered with the lawn - once every three days for 15-20 minutes.

We've had hail damage so I think that accounts for some of the tattering. But I'm wondering why the leaves seem so thin and pale to make them so susceptible to damage. The other white oak in our community have deep green, thick leaves. Does it look chlorotic to you? I chose bur oak because I had read it is adaptable to different soil types and they seem to do so well here.

Just wanting to bump to get feedback re: Chlorosis......

Does it look chlorotic? If yes, will it outgrow it once better established?

Oneisenough, can you post a picture of the whole tree and one of where the trunk meets the ground? My bet is transplant shock is making everything worse. Are other bur oaks on your street chlorotic when mature? If not I bet yours will establish and grow out of it.

FWIW, this is a terrible summer for pin oaks here. You'd think half the ones sold were yellow leafed cultivars lol.

How big of a transplant was the whip? At three foot tall a gallon of water every three days in my clay was enough for my trees. By the time my metasequoia was twenty five foot tall it needed eight hours of full sprinklering every three days to pull through a drought.

Our neighborhood is overrun with squirrels and they nibbled at the trunk before we could get it covered. Behind trunk is a bamboo support. When planted we knew not to create a volcano or bury the flare. I don't recall if it was root-bound when we got it but I'm typically pretty careful to tease apart roots to try to prevent the tree from strangling. We usually dig a hole and fill it up with water and put the tree down into it and then backfill. And we gave it regular, long waterings all summer last year and even some in winter because that's our driest season.

It's about 7 feet tall.

I can't find a single leaf without some kind of damage.