Colony Readiness: 1 Clonal Plants: Modular Growth as Enacted Readiness

How clonal plant colonies orchestrate coherent life through distributed modules, local inclinations, and perspectival alignment.

Clonal plants—strawberries, grasses, ferns, and other species that spread via runners or rhizomes—challenge conventional notions of individuality. Each ramet is physiologically semi-autonomous yet remains integrated into a colony-scale field of readiness, where growth, resource allocation, and reproduction emerge as distributed enactments.

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1. Ability: The Colony’s Aperture

• Ability in clonal plants is distributed across the network of interconnected ramets.

• Examples:

  • Resource capture: spatially distributed roots exploit heterogeneous soil patches.

  • Vegetative expansion: stolons and rhizomes enable coordinated colonisation of new areas.

  • Environmental resilience: if some ramets die or are shaded, others maintain colony function.

• The colony’s capacity for survival, expansion, and reproduction emerges from structural integration rather than being encoded in any single ramet.

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2. Inclination: Local Biases and Environmental Feedback

• Ramets interpret local environmental cues: light, water, nutrients, or competition.

• Local inclinations shape:

  • Growth direction (toward light or open soil)

  • Branching patterns

  • Investment in vegetative spread versus flowering

• These inclinations are dynamic and context-sensitive, allowing the colony to adaptively allocate effort across its spatial extent.

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3. Individuation: Partial and Perspectival

• Each ramet is a perspectival locus, enacting colony potential from its own local vantage.

• Partial individuation:

  • Ramets act semi-autonomously, responding to local cues.

  • Integration through vascular or rhizomal connections aligns these local enactments into a coherent colony.

• The colony itself is not simply a sum of ramets—its identity emerges from coordinated actualisation of distributed perspectives.

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4. Conceptual Payoffs

• Explains modular flexibility without invoking central control.

• Clarifies division of labour: some ramets prioritise vegetative expansion, others reproductive output.

• Provides a graded account of individuality: each ramet is individuated but nested within the colony-level field of readiness.

• Suggests testable predictions:

  • Manipulate resource availability to specific ramets → shifts in colony-level growth patterns reveal inclination fields.

  • Severing rhizomal connections → reduced coherence and altered ability expression.

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5. Closing Reflections

Clonal plants exemplify how distributed ability, local inclination, and partial individuation generate coherent collective life without a central controller.

• Ability: emerges from modular architecture and integration.

• Inclination: arises from local environmental interpretation.

• Individuation: perspectival, partial, and graded.

Life unfolds as a field of interpreted possibilities, even in systems that appear stationary or modular. Clonal plants remind us that agency and individuality are relational and enacted, not solely determined by the boundaries of a single organism.