What have temperatures and weather been like in the past week there?

How did you plant it? How did you deal with pot-bound roots? Did you amend the backfill soil? Why such a seemingly narrow planting hole?

Tell us about how you've been watering it or determining whether/when it needed to be watered.

Planting a Tree or Shrub

The plant was in a very small pot so we thought it didn't need a bigger hole. Of course this week we have had a heat wave, the humidity has been ridiculous. It has been the high 80s 70-90% humidity. We thought we were in the clear because it has been fall like outside low 70s. He was outgrowing his pot and we thought we had limited time. We tried to nicely break apart the circular roots but we didn't go nuts because we didn't know much about how to not hurt the tree. We had some bad storms this past week with extremely heavy rainfall so we didn't water him at all.

Was your little tree sitting in the full sun before planting?

its future is all in the buds.. and i cant see them in this pic

you did just about everything wrong ... do read brandons primer ...

whether it will live is left to fate ... dont be surprised if all those needles fall off eventually ... it all depends how it flushes out in spring.. and if you can live with how ugly it might be for a few years ...

i would extend the removal of grass at least 2 more feet around the tree.. to keep the dude with the lawnmower and weedwhacker away from it ...

it will still be a place for a replacement.. should this one fail ...

ken

Yes he was in full sun before

So, in the future...how would "doing everything right" go?

Here are some of the potential problems:

1) planting time - I understand that the weather didn't turn out like you expected, but waiting just a little while would have been less stressful for the tree.

2) planting hole size - Based on the picture, it appears your hole should have been around three times as wide as it was. Unless the rootball was absolutely tiny in comparison to the tree (which hopefully it wasn't), your hole was just barely big enough to hold it. See section 4 in the above link.

3) roots - From your description, I wonder if you eliminated circling/pot-bound roots. If not, the tree is likely to suffer or fail later on. See section 3a in the link.

4) watering - You should definitely have watered the tree when it was planted. Even if you planted it in the middle of a rain storm, it needed to be watered in well. Now, you need to keep a careful check on soil moisture both around and inside the rootball. See section 12 for information on how to do this.

5) grass - As Ken suggests, I'd eliminate a 2' radius ring of grass from around the base of the tree and apply some good mulch.

Thank you for your help

Well, it has been 10 years of suspense, & we must know “Did Herb live???”