Plant research has often been done with plants. In genetics, the breeding of pea plants allowed Gregor Mendel to derive the basic laws governing inheritance, and examination of chromosomes in maize allowed Barbara McClintock to demonstrate their connection to inherited traits. The plant "Arabidopsis thaliana" is used in laboratories as a model organism to understand how genes control the growth and development of plant structures. NASA predicts that space stations or space colonies will one day rely on plants for life support. Ancient trees are revered and many are famous. Tree rings themselves are an important method of dating in archeology,
54 Parkside the Royal Horticultural Society, of which he was also a Council member. He was appointed a member of the Appeal Tribunal (a special court set up to reconsider a decision by another court) for the County of Berkshire in 1916. One of his friends was William Bateson (1861-1926), an advocate of the ideas of Gregor Mendel who introduced the term ‘genetics’ to describe the study of heredity and whose 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics. Sutton provided the means for Bateson to carry out extensive studies