Robin Franz Henig The Monk In The Garden Analysis

The Monk in the Garden by Robin Marantz Henig is a novel which follows the life and the experiments of Gregor Mendel. It provides great insight as to what the world was like at the time of Mendel’s experimentation, who Mendel interacted with, and different scientific discoveries made over the course of his life. In Chapter 2, entitled “Southern Exposure”, Henig goes into detail about the importance of the location of Mendel’s garden. Mendel’s garden has been a place of controversy for nearly 150 years. Although one might not think that something as trivial as to whether Mendel’s garden was located on one side of the monastery versus the other is not important, but as Henig states it: “The solution to this old, and only recently solved, mystery has helped us discern the real Mendel from the Mendel trapped in myth. The solution resolved in an apparent …show more content…
Mendel’s confidence plummeted and felt that since his results from the Hieracium experiment were false, then his results from the Pisum experiment must also be incorrect. At this time, Mendel corresponded with a Swiss botanist named Carl von Nageli, who focused mainly on pollination. As Henig states, “Because of misdirection, accidental or deliberate, from the great Nageli, Mendel lost faith in his own results,” (Henig 161). One cannot be sure that Nageli truly meant to lead Mendel astray in his experiment but in a book he published following the death of Mendel, about organic evolution, Nageli fails to mention any of Mendel’s work; Nageli blatantly ignored the significant impact that Mendel had made on