1860s

Experimental garden of the Augustinian abbey of St Thomas, Old Brno (today Mendlovo náměstí), Moravia

Mendel's Garden, St Thomas's Abbey, Brno

Between 1856 and 1863 the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel grows and records some 28,000 plants, most of them peas, in the garden of St Thomas's Abbey in Old Brno. In 1865 he presents the results to the Brno natural history society, laying down the laws of heredity that make him the father of genetics.

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Year: 1860s
Where: Moravia · CZ
Era: Industrial
Coordinates: 49.191, 16.593

The moment

Twenty-eight thousand plants in a monastery garden

Between 1856 and 1863 Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, grew and recorded some 28,000 plants, most of them peas, in the garden of St Thomas's Abbey in Old Brno. He followed seven traits: seed shape, flower colour, seed-coat colour, pod shape, the colour of unripe pods, flower position and plant height.

By crossing varieties and counting their offspring generation after generation, he found that traits were passed on in regular, predictable ratios. Those patterns are now taught as Mendel's laws of heredity.

The garden lay below Špilberk hill. The abbey occupied a former Cistercian convent, long Baroque wings beside the tall Gothic basilica of the Assumption in bare red brick, and Mendel's small glass greenhouse stood in its quadrangle.

A friar who studied under Doppler

Mendel was born on 20 July 1822 in Heinzendorf, in Austrian Silesia, today's Hynčice in the Czech Republic. He entered St Thomas's Abbey and took the name Gregor.

The abbey invested in him. In 1851 it sent him to the University of Vienna, where he studied under the physicist Christian Doppler. Five years later he began counting peas.

Thirty-five years of silence

On 8 February and 8 March 1865 Mendel presented his results to the Natural History Society of Brno. The society published his paper, "Experiments on Plant Hybridization", in 1866, and almost nobody noticed: in the next 35 years it was cited about three times.

In 1868 he became abbot, and administration ended his experiments. He kept bees, recorded the weather, was among the founders of the Austrian Meteorological Society in 1865, and died in Brno on 6 January 1884.

In 1900 three botanists, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, independently rediscovered his work. The friar of Old Brno became the father of genetics sixteen years after his death.

Why Brno claims him

Mendel's laws are taught in every Czech school biology class. Brno claims him as the country's greatest contribution to world science, and he appears in the top hundred of the Greatest Czech poll.

The claim is shared. Mendel was a German-speaking Silesian in Austrian Moravia, and Czechia, Austria and Germany all count him as their own.

Science has kept returning to him. In 2021 his remains were exhumed for DNA analysis, and his own genome turned out to carry a predisposition to heart problems: the man who founded genetics, read by genetics at last.

Sources

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