There is a kind of immortality in every garden - Stillmeadow Daybook, Gladys Teber, 1899-1980

.......according to the legend that has persisted for a full century, Bateson en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bateson spent most of that train ride immersed in an old article from a small journal published in Austria. He was not gazing idly at the scenery.

The article, written by an obscure monk named George Mendel, described the elegant botanical experiments he had conducted in a modest monastery garden in Moravia. Mendel has painstakingly crossed and backcrossed pollen and egg cells from the common pea plant to reach a better understanding of inheritance. After working on peas and other plant species for seven long years, Mendel had recorded and analyzed his findings in a two-part lecture to a local scientific society in 1865. The lecture was later published as a forty-four-page article in the society's Proceedings -- and then was all but ignored for the rest of Mendel's life. ~ “The Monk in the Garden” ~ Robin Marantz Henig