Abstract
White clover (Trifolium repens) is distributed up to 2400 m along the Fujinomiya road to Mt. Fuji. Along the road, we collected 75 adult plants from five populations at widely different altitudes. These plants are considered as a suitable material for analyzing the patterns of inter-population variations in plant architecture, biomass allocation and clonal growth pattern. In this paper, the following three hypotheses were tested using the common garden technique : (1) High-altitude population is likely to grow to be compact stature. (2) Five populations may show different biomass allocation patterns, which may be closely related to their altitudes ; High-altitude population may show larger allocation to roots but smaller to flower-heads and leaves including petioles than low-altitude population. (3) The populations may show different clonal growth patterns ; The plants from high-altitude, population may have many small stolons by which they form a phalanx growth pattern, whereas those from low-altitude population may have a small number of stolons with large size by which they form a guerrilla growth pattern. The results strongly supported the above three hypotheses. Mechanisms behind the between-population differences are also discussed.
