In clonal plants, persistent rhizomes can serve multiple purposes, including resource storage, modulation of heterogeneous resource distributions, maintenance of bud banks and promotion of recovery from disturbance. Clonal plants are commonly long‐lived and, in temperate zones, often exhibit organ preformation. Thus, investigations of how the timing of disturbance to the rhizome affects plant performance must occur over multiple growing seasons, but these types of studies are rare. We conducted a field experiment to examine how the persistent rhizome supports the existing shoot, new ramet production and recovery from damage using mayapple The location and timing of severing affected both plant persistence (production of new shoots) and performance (leaf area), with effects differing for new shoots that developed at the front versus the back of the rhizome system. Across years, severing location and past years’ shoot size influenced plant persistence and performance, while the effect of timing of severing diminished. Initial sexual status had little effect on rhizome system response that was not accounted for by initial leaf area. Severing generally led to the establishment of two independent rhizome systems. Relative to unmanipulated control systems, these two systems had more total leaf area, but less average leaf area per system.
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