The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics

by Robin Marantz Henig

I often think of him now as one of a dying breed of men, who want, really, nothing for themselves, who have effaced their innermost desires without self-flagellation, and—in order to avoid the desperations of solitude—have given themselves over completely to their wives and to their children, and ultimately to their children’s children, and done it with a magnificent serenity. —“The Flower Garden,” David Guterson

There is a kind of immortality in every garden. —Stillmeadow Daybook, Gladys Taber, 1899–1980

Part of the allure of Mendel as a hero of modern science is that we can picture him puttering in his garden, seeking answers to universal questions in his crops of peas. To some extent, Mendel’s story is primarily the story of a gardener, patiently tending his plants, collecting them, counting them, working out his ratios, and calmly, clearly explaining an amazing finding—then waiting for someone to understand what he was talking about. It is the story of a gentle revolutionary who was born a generation too soon.

“I turned from animal breeding to plant breeding,” Mendel later said with a chuckle. “You see, the bishop did not understand that plants also have sex.”

Augustinians, in contrast, emphasized teaching and research over prayer.

A garden is like the self. It has so many layers and winding paths, real or imagined, that it can never be known, completely, even by the most intimate of friends. —Deep in the Green, Anne Raver

St. Augustine loved books like these. “If you pray,” he once wrote, “you are talking to God; if you read, God is talking to you.”

Klácel helped repudiate the belief, common among biologists at the time, that plants and animals can metamorphose and pass on their new traits to their offspring in response to changes in living conditions.

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. —At Seventy, May Sarton, 1912–1995

Each of Mendel’s seven traits appeared on a different chromosome—or, in one case, on two distant ends of the same chromosome. This reduced the chances that these traits would be coupled through a process called linkage—which would have seriously muddied the monk’s results.

Mendel probably believed that counting his pea progeny would reflect an underlying mathematical relationship.