A small garden. An enormous discovery.

Mendel’s
Pea Parlour.

Two purple flowers can have a white-flowered child. Strange? Yes. Magic? No. Put on your gardening gloves and find the rule.

Experiment 1 of 3

Purple meets white.

Cross a pure purple plant with a white one. Will the colours mix?

50%
No timer. No points. Just a wonderfully nosy gardener.
An original botanical illustration of purple and white pea flowers surrounding a monastery garden
THE EXPERIMENTAL PLOT / READY
Your seedlings will bloom here.

The harvest ledger

Purple: — / White: —

A probability is a long-run pattern, not a promise about a handful of plants.

The four possibilities

Each parent passes along one of its two letter-copies, chosen at random. Predict first; then open the seed envelopes.

A field note: P and p are versions of the same gene. Every plant here gets one from each parent.

A monk with a notebook

Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian friar who studied pea inheritance in the 1850s and 1860s. Counting thousands of plants helped him uncover patterns that made him a founder of genetics.

The parlour’s simple rule

In this one-trait model, PP and Pp have purple flowers. Only pp has white flowers. “Dominant” means visible with one copy, not better, stronger, or more common. Real inheritance can be more complicated.