How many years did Mendel conduct his pea plant experiments?

Mendel conducted his pea plant experiments for 8 years, from 1856 through 1863. During this period, he carried out a large and carefully organized series of crosses in the garden of St. Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic.

His work was unusually systematic for the era. Mendel selected pea varieties that bred true, meaning they consistently produced the same form of a trait. He then crossed plants with contrasting characteristics and tracked the traits through successive generations. He focused on seven features, including seed shape, seed color, flower color, pod shape, flower position, and plant height.

Mendel studied roughly 28,000 pea plants. The experiments showed that inherited characteristics behaved as if they were controlled by discrete, separable units—later understood as genes and alleles. His statistical analysis led to principles now associated with segregation and independent assortment.

Mendel presented his findings in 1865 and published them in 1866 in “Experiments on Plant Hybridization.” His contemporaries largely overlooked the paper, but it was rediscovered around 1900 and became foundational to genetics. The eight-year figure refers specifically to the main pea experiments, not every botanical investigation Mendel conducted during his life.