Your Japanese Maple Looks healthy to me. The brown tips may be water related. How much water has the tree been getting? My Japanese Maples usually get the brown leaves when they don't get enough water. Perhaps the Japanese Maple put out it's new growth before you bought it.

Thanks stuart lawrence. I've been giving it a deep watering about once a week, with occasional further watering on hot days.

When I bought the tree, the person at the nursery told me to plant it at the same level the soil comes to in the pot. So I did that. But I noticed when planting it, when some of the soil fell away, that the root ball was quite low and deep in the soil. About 6 or 7 inches of the trunk was buried in soil before the roots started.

I've been reading over this forum and starting to panic, as many people say that the root ball needs to be very close to the surface of the soil.

Not sure if I should try to raise the tree a bit higher or just leave it and avoid disturbing it.

The top of the roots should be even with the outside soil but don't panic, the tree hasn't been in the ground that long and Japanese Maples are pretty tough. So re-planting the tree and removing the excess soil on top would be recommended.

Thanks stuart lawrence, would you recommend doing it now, or waiting until winter (June for me) when the tree goes dormant?

If only planted a couple of months ago, you can do it now.......or wait until fall, if that makes more sense with your weather.

The brown tips and/or spotting on the leaves is generally attributed to erratic or inconsistent watering practices, allowing the soil to dry too much between waterings then soaking it. It's a very common affliction with container grown JM's :-) If you can keep the soil consistently moist - not too dry nor too wet - you should see much less browning.

I don't know if your still following but I am in Australia too and got a one year old JM bare root in the mail in July. I put it in a pot and in September it broke bud and grew a lot then it din not do much but look good until about late Jan when it put on another big growth spurt. We get 35. 40 degree summers and it gets morning direct and afternoon shade. But it really on grows in spurts. So don't worry too much if you don't see it do much for a while.