Mendel’s experimental garden measured 35 by 7 meters. That made the dedicated plot roughly 245 square meters, a surprisingly compact space for the thousands of pea plants he cultivated and examined.
Beginning in 1856 at St. Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, Mendel used garden peas (Pisum sativum) to investigate how individual traits passed between generations. Peas were especially useful because they self-pollinate, produce distinct visible traits, and can also be cross-pollinated by hand.
The 35-by-7-meter figure refers to the plot traditionally identified as Mendel’s experimental garden. Some modern summaries describe the wider monastery garden or grounds as about 2 hectares, which can cause confusion when the two measurements are treated as the same space. Mendel’s work eventually covered about 28,000 plants and seven paired characteristics, including seed shape, flower color, pod form, and plant height.
He presented his findings in Brno in 1865, and his paper was published in 1866. The work was largely overlooked until its rediscovery around 1900, when it became foundational to genetics.