By Kelly Vowels
Sunday, December 21, marked the Winter Solstice for 2025, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and the start of winter. Winter can feel stark and still, a time when the world seems dormant. Yet, beneath the quiet surface, life is actively surviving and adapting. Most people are familiar with how animals hibernate, migrate, or find ways to cope with the cold, but plants have their own remarkable strategies to make it through the season.
How Trees Survive Winter
Trees have evolved a variety of ways to endure winter. While roots and underground parts are insulated from freezing temperatures, branches, trunks, and leaves are exposed. Different types of trees handle this challenge in unique ways.
Deciduous trees shed their leaves in fall to conserve water and protect themselves from ice and wind. Conifers, on the other hand, keep their needles. The needles hold water efficiently and are structurally better suited to withstand ice and wind.
Protecting Cells from Freezing
Trees are mostly water, about 80% of their structure, making them vulnerable to freezing. To survive, they have developed clever methods to protect their cells.
One method is converting starch into sugars, which act like antifreeze. This lowers the freezing point inside cells while allowing water outside the cells to freeze safely. Another method is increasing cell flexibility, which lets water move more freely, reducing the chance of damage from ice crystals. Some trees also enter a “glass phase,” where liquids inside cells solidify just enough to prevent injury.
The only cells that must stay alive through winter are the phloem cells, which make up a small portion of the tree. Most of the tree is dead xylem cells, which can safely freeze. Extreme cold can occasionally cause damage, but these adaptations generally keep trees healthy until spring.
Dormancy in Other Plants
Many other plants survive winter by going dormant. Their above-ground parts die back while roots or underground structures remain protected from the cold. Some annual plants complete their life cycle in a single year and die off, relying on seeds to carry their legacy into the next growing season.
Celebrating Winter Survival
Winter adaptations in plants are remarkable. They allow forests, gardens, and wild landscapes to endure the cold months, ready to thrive again in spring. By understanding these strategies, we can better appreciate the quiet resilience of the natural world during the shortest days of the year.
