Field note · October 2026

Reading Winter Injury and Hardiness Scores

Oak Summit Nursery · Southern Manitoba

Pomologica winter injury scale page showing scores from no injury to killed and branch diagrams for scores zero and one. Pomologica winter injury page with branch diagrams for slight and marked injury and explanatory text. Pomologica freezing test reference with a zero to five tissue injury scale and two shoot cross section diagrams. Four shoot cross section diagrams illustrating progressively larger areas of dead tissue in a freezing test. Pomologica hardiness rating reference explaining a one to five scale where five is the hardiest rating. Pomologica table comparing the winter injury scales used by North American research stations, such as the University of Minnesota and the University of Saskatchewan. Pomologica reference page for the sweet cherry Leningradskaya Chernaya, used as an example in the rating discussion.
there are a few scales that places used to rate cold hardiness or winter injured, 1 to 5 is used in a few ways. I've put together a page to explain it as a reference, so when you hear this cherry got a 4.5 or this pear was a 2, and if you wonder what that means, there's a reference to make sense of it. https://pomologica.ca/scales

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