Germination of species with hard woody indehiscent endocarps has troubled seed scientists for many years. To understand how germination is regulated in such species Chia et al. show that the conditions required for dormancy loss and germination are effectively revealed through burial trials matched with environmentally relevant laboratory experiments on a representative species, Persoonia longifolia, from southern Western Australia.






This approach allowed the authors to identify the key drivers of dormancy loss through a comprehensive series of experiments executed over five years which revealed that warm plus cold stratification is required to break physiological seed dormancy in P. longifolia.