What other plant did Mendel study after peas?

The other plant Mendel studied after peas was hawkweed, a group of plants in the genus Hieracium. He investigated hawkweed hybrids after his celebrated pea experiments, hoping to test whether the same inheritance patterns applied more broadly.

The results were puzzling. Unlike the relatively predictable pea crosses, Mendel’s hawkweed offspring were highly variable, and many resembled the maternal plant. He published a report on these experiments in 1869 and discussed the results with the botanist Carl Nägeli, one of his scientific correspondents.

Mendel could not explain why hawkweed behaved so differently. The reason became clearer later: many hawkweed species reproduce through apomixis, a form of asexual seed production. In such plants, seeds can develop without the usual combination of genetic material from two parents, so the offspring may be nearly identical to the mother.

Hawkweed therefore became an important cautionary episode in Mendel’s research. His pea results were not a universal template for every plant, because reproductive biology matters. Maize was studied by other geneticists, snapdragons became famous for incomplete dominance, and Mendel also kept bees—but hawkweed was his notable post-pea plant study.