Born January 19, 1859, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Died October 30, 1953, San Francisco, California
Alice Eastwood was a woman who had no formal schooling in botany, the passion to which she devoted her life. As a young adult roaming through the countryside near her Colorado home, she would gather wildflowers and other plant specimens, and carefully compare them to descriptions and illustrations in books—teaching herself scientific methods of identification and classification. In her determination to discover unknown species, Eastwood traveled into the frontier wilderness where she encountered mountaineers, Indians, wild animals, and other unfamiliar sights. But these did not keep her from building a major botanical collection, which would become the foundation of the University of Colorado’s herbarium (a “museum” for plants—dried, mounted, and labeled for scientific study). When Eastwood’s reputation as a scientist spread, she became curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, one of the most important scientific institutions in the country. Then she traveled throughout California as she had in Colorado, looking for plants to add to the academy’s collection. Spending more than fifty years at the institution, she added 340,000 specimens to the herbarium, and helped raise public awareness of the need to save native American plants, especially California’s majestic redwood trees.
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