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Publisher Summary Winter hardiness of cereal grains and perennial forage crops is of considerable concern to agronomists in cold northern temperate regions of the world. Of all the factors relating to the winter hardiness complex, cold hardiness, the ability to withstand low freezing temperatures, is of paramount importance. The ability of plants to withstand low temperatures is a latent trait, which exhibits an annual periodicity. It is only through the interaction of appropriate environmental cues and the genetic potential of a species that an increase in cold hardiness is manifested. Therefore, of prime concern are the environmental factors that affect the annual process of cold acclimation and the annual process of deacclimation. Thus, to improve the winter hardiness of agronomic crops, the problem of cold hardiness must be addressed. Fundamental to such an endeavor is the need to characterize the freezing stresses that are imposed on the plant tissue, to understand the repercussions of these stresses on the cellular environment and architecture, and to determine what constitutes freezing injury at the cellular and molecular level. Only when such information is available can the physiological and biochemical aspects of cold acclimation be fully elucidated.