Alice Eastwood

Who was Alice Eastwood?

Alice Eastwood was a Canadian American botanist. Born in Toronto, she moved to the United States at 14, and from age twenty to thirty, was a teacher in Denver, Colorado and taught herself botany. In 1890 she assumed a post in the herbarium at the California Academy of Sciences. Eastwood was given a position as joint Curator of the Academy with Katherine Brandegee in 1892. By 1894, with the retirement of Brandegee, Eastwood was procurator and Head of the Department of Botany, a position she held until she retired in 1949.

In her early botanical work, Eastwood made a number of collecting expeditions to the edge of the Big Sur region, which at the end of the 19th century was a virtual frontier, since no roads penetrated the central coast beyond the Carmel Highlands. In those excursions she discovered a number of plants theretofore unknown, including Eastwood's willow and Hickman's potentilla. Eastwood was credited with saving the Academy's type plant collection after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Opposing curatorial conventions of her era, Eastwood segregated the type specimens from the main collection.