The term stratify comes from an old agricultural practice from before refrigeration where seeds that need that cold moist period were placed outdoors in strata in a garden bed over the winter. Being buried a few inches deep with a straw cover to avoid the extreme cold of winter they could be dug up in spring and planted with decent success rates. Many, but far from all, tree seeds fall into the category of seeds that benefit from stratification. One notable exception that is common to us is the white oak group. Those seeds will send down a tap root within weeks of falling to the ground and will then show above ground growth, stem and leaves, the following spring. The low rate of success of white oak family acorns is because so few get buried in those first few critical weeks. If you manually plant a few acorns of white oak, bur oak, swamp white oak or others of that family as soon as they fall to the ground you will have seedling trees the next spring in abundance.
