In natural habitats, plants often experience selective pressure caused by temporal and spatial variation in light and nutrient availabilities, and clonal plants possess potential added capacity to respond to environmental changes via phenotypic plasticity and biomass allocation. Although many previous studies have focused on the effects of light and nutrient availability on plant growth and reproduction, few have explicitly tested for adaptive plasticity to resource allocation in clonal plants in response to light and nutrient levels. We conducted a greenhouse experiment on the rhizomatous, clonal plant Bolboschoenus planiculmis to investigate the effects of light intensity and nutrient availability on its growth, asexual reproduction, and resource storage strategies. The experiment incorporated two levels of light intensity (full daylight and shade) with four levels of nutrient availability (control, low, medium and high nutrient). Clonal growth, asexual reproduction, and resource storage were significantly decreased by shading. Plastic responses in the number and size of modules seemed to precede responses in biomass accumulation. Under full light, total biomass; number of leaves, rhizome ramets, and long rhizome ramets; total rhizome length; and length and number of buds were greater at the highest nutrient level than at the other three nutrient levels. Under shading, nutrient level did not affect these traits, indicating that low light intensity can constrain responses to different nutrient levels, and that high nutrient levels cannot compensate for lack of light. Allocation to total rhizomes, and to each of three size classes of corms was also significantly affected by light intensity. When light was limited, plants allocated less mass to rhizomes and large and medium corms but maintained allocation to small corms. Nutrient level did not affect allocation to total rhizomes, but the allocation to corms decreased with increasing nutrient availability, suggesting that the storage function of corms may serve to buffer the effects of nutrient shortage on future growth. Under the same conditions, the total rhizome biomass allocated more resources to long rhizomes than to short rhizomes to maintain a relatively high reproductive ability. Further, total corm mass allocated more resources to corms without ramets than to corms with ramets, suggesting that the storage function of the corm was given priority over its function in asexual reproduction. This study increases our understanding of the ecological significance of adaptive responses of rhizomatous clonal plants to environmental changes.