Creosote Bush

The King Clone creosote ring in California's Mojave Desert is estimated at 11,700 years old - one of the oldest living organisms on Earth. But you'd never notice it. There's no massive trunk, no impressive height, just a ring of scraggly shrubs about 70 feet in diameter. The original plant died millennia ago; what remains are clones that grew outward from the center, each generation replacing the last. The organism persists by continuously abandoning its original position.

This clonal longevity strategy trades individual immortality for lineage persistence. No single stem in the ring is particularly old - maybe a few hundred years. But the genetic individual they collectively represent has been continuously present for longer than human civilization has existed. The creosote bush solved longevity by making the individual disposable while making the pattern persistent.

Creosote's chemical warfare enables this long game. The plant produces chemicals that inhibit the germination of other plants - including its own seeds. Nothing grows under a creosote bush. This allelopathy creates defensible space around each clone, reducing competition while the ring slowly expands outward at a few inches per century.

The business parallel is franchise versus ownership models for organizational persistence. The individual unit is replaceable; the pattern is what persists. McDonald's doesn't need any particular restaurant to survive - it needs the system to continue replicating. Creosote bush teaches that extreme longevity might require letting go of attachment to specific instances in favor of pattern persistence across time.