Alice Eastwood
Born	January 19, 1859 (1859-01-19) Toronto, Canada West
Died	October 30, 1953 (1953-10-31) (aged 94) San Francisco,California, United States
Resting place	Toronto Necropolis[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Botany
Institutions	California Academy of Sciences Gray Herbarium New York Botanical Garden British Museum Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew
Author abbrev. (botany)	Eastw.

Alice Eastwood (January 19, 1859 – October 30, 1953) was aCanadian Americanbotanist. She is credited with building the botanical collection at theCalifornia Academy of Sciences inSan Francisco. She published over 310 scientific articles and authored 395 land plant species names, the fourth-highest number of such names authored by any female scientist.^[2] There are seventeen currently recognized species named for her, as well as the generaEastwoodia andAliciella.

Alice Eastwood was born on January 19, 1859, inToronto, Canada West, to Colin Skinner Eastwood and Eliza Jane Gowdey Eastwood.^[3] Her father worked at theToronto Asylum for the Insane.^[4] When she was six her mother died;^[5] Eastwood and her siblings were cared for by various relatives, and for a time, Alice and her sister were placed at the Oshawa Convent in Toronto.^[3] In 1873, Eastwood and her siblings were reunited with their father and moved toDenver, Colorado.^[3] In 1879, she graduated asvaledictorian fromEast High School,^[3] where she then taught for ten years.^[3][6]

Eastwood was a self-taught botanist and learned from published botany manuals includingGray’s Manual and theFlora of Colorado.^[6][7] Her botanical knowledge led her to being asked to guideAlfred Russel Wallace up the summit ofGrays Peak in Denver. Eastwood was also a member ofTheodore Dru Alison Cockerell's Colorado Biological Association.^[8]

In 1891, after reviewing Eastwood's specimen collection in Denver,Mary Katharine Brandegee, Curator of the Botany Department at theCalifornia Academy of Sciences, hired Eastwood to work in the academy'sherbarium.^[7] In 1892, she was promoted to a position as joint curator of the academy with Brandegee. 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.^[4]

Eastwood died in San Francisco on October 30, 1953. The California Academy of Sciences retains a collection of her papers and works.^[6]

Early in her career, Eastwood made collecting expeditions in Colorado and theFour Corners region. She became close with theWetherill Family, and visited Alamo Ranch inMesa Verde often, beginning in July 1889. Long before that, she was considered a part of the family, and so did not sign the guest register on later trips. Each time Eastwood visited, she was particularly welcomed by Al Wetherill, who shared an interest in her work. In 1892, he served as her guide on a 10-day trip to southeasternUtah to collect desert plants.^[9][10]

Eastwood also made collecting expeditions to the edge of theBig Sur region, which at the end of the 19th century was a virtual frontier, since no roads penetrated the central coast beyond theCarmel Highlands. On those excursions, she discovered several plants, includingHickman's potentilla.

Eastwood is credited with saving the academy'stype plant collection after the1906 San Francisco earthquake.^[11] Departing from the curatorial conventions of her era, Eastwood segregated the type specimens from the main collection.^[6] Thisclassification system permitted her to retrieve 1,497 specimens from the damaged building.^[12] The cabinet she had stored them in was damaged; using her apron, she lowered the specimens from a window to a friend as the fire after the earthquake approached, then commandeered a wagon. The specimens and records she saved were almost all that survived of the academy's collection.^[4]

After the earthquake, before the academy had constructed a new building, Eastwood studied in herbaria in Europe and other U.S. regions, including theGray Herbarium, theNew York Botanical Garden, theNational Museum of Natural History of Paris, theBritish Museum, and theRoyal Botanic Gardens at Kew.^[3] In 1912, with completion of the new academy facilities atGolden Gate Park, Eastwood returned to the position of curator of the herbarium and reconstructed the lost part of the collection. She went on numerous collecting vacations in the Western United States, includingAlaska (1914),Arizona,Utah andIdaho. Her well-knownexsiccata-like series of plant specimens from California has in parts printed labels entitledCalifornia Academy of Sciences, Flora of California.^[13] Starting in 1928, Eastwood accompanied fellow botanistSusan Delano McKelvey on several collecting expeditions in the Southwest and they built a lasting collaboration, frequently corresponding and exchanging specimens.^[14] By keeping the first set of each collection for the academy and exchanging the duplicates with other institutions, Eastwood was able to build the collection, Abrams noting that she contributed "thousands of sheets to the Academy's herbarium, personally accounting for its growth in size and representation of western flora". By 1942 she had built the collection to about one third of a million specimens, nearly three times the number of specimens destroyed in the 1906 fire.^[6]

Eastwood is credited with publishing over 310 articles during her career. She served as editor of the biological journalZoe and as an assistant editor forErythea before the 1906 earthquake, and founded a journal,Leaflets of Western Botany (1932–1966), withJohn Thomas Howell.^[7] Eastwood was director of theSan Francisco Botanical Club for several years throughout the 1890s. In 1929, she helped to form theAmerican Fuchsia Society.^[1]

Her main botanical interests were western U.S.Liliaceae and the generaLupinus,Arctostaphylos andCastilleja.

• There are currently seventeen recognized species named for Eastwood, as well as the generaAliciella,Eastwoodia andEastwoodiella.
• A member of the California Academy of Sciences since 1892, she was unanimously elected an honorary member of the academy in 1942.
• In 1959, the CAS opened the Eastwood Hall of Botany
• In 1903 she was one of only two women listed inAmerican Men of Science to be denoted, by a star as among the top 25% of professionals in their discipline.^[16]
• In 1949, in recognition of her achievements, the American Fuchsia Society awarded her with its Medal of Achievement.^[1]
• She was honored in the binomial name ofBoletus eastwoodiae, an attractive though poisonousbolete of western North America which she collected. However, this was renamedBoletus pulcherrimus due to a misidentification of type material.^[17] It still bears the common name of Alice Eastwood's bolete.
• Eastwood worked to save a redwood grove inHumboldt County, which was later named Alice Eastwood Memorial Grove.^[6]

• Agoseris apargioides var.eastwoodiae (woolly goat chicory, Eastwood's seaside agoseris, Beach Dandelion)
• Arctostaphylos crustacea ssp. eastwoodiana (Eastwood's Brittleleaf Manzanita)
• Arctostaphylos glandulosa ssp. glandulosa (Eastwood's Manzanita)
• Amsinckia eastwoodiae (Eastwood's Fiddleneck)
• Delphinium parryi ssp.eastwoodiae (Eastwood's larkspur)
• Erigeron aliceae^[16]
• Erythranthe (Mimulus) eastwoodiae^[18] (Eastwood's Monkeyflower)
• Fritillaria eastwoodiae (Butte County fritillary)
• Malacothamnus eastwoodiae (Alice's lovely bushmallow)
• Podistera (Lomatium) eastwoodiae^[19] (Eastwood's Woodroot)
• Salix eastwoodiae (Eastwood's willow)^[16]

• Aliciella
• Eastwoodia
• Eastwoodiella

• Rare species
• Monterey Peninsula
• Timeline of women in science
• Rubroboletus eastwoodiae

• Bergen's botany (1901) With Joseph Young Bergen.
• A flora of the South Fork of Kings River (1902)
• Leaflets of western botany Vol. 1–10 with index (1932–1966) With J.T. Howell.
• Zoe: a biological journal Vol. 3–4. (1892) With K.L. Brandegee and T.S. Brandegee. Retrieved 2009-08-19.
• A Handbook of the Trees of California (1905) San Francisco, California Academy of Sciences.

• Abrams, Leroy (1949). "Alice Eastwood: Western Botanist".Pacific Discovery.2 (1):14–17.
• Howell, John Thomas (1953)."Alice Eastwood: 1859-1953".Taxon.3 (4):98–100.doi:10.1002/j.1996-8175.1954.tb01564.x.JSTOR 1217779.
• F.M. MacFarland; R.C. Miller; John Thomas Howell (1943–1949). "Biographical Sketch of Alice Eastwood".Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences. Fourth series.25:ix–xiv.
• F.M. MacFarland; Veronica J. Sexton (1943–1949). "Bibliography of the Writings of Alice Eastwood".Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences. Fourth series.25:xv–xxiv.

Wikimedia Commons has media related toAlice Eastwood.

Wikispecies has information related toAlice Eastwood.

• Biography of Alice EastwoodArchived August 7, 2020, at theWayback Machine
• Works by Alice Eastwood available online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, Fourth series, Vol. XXV available online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• Inventory to the papers of Alice Eastwood at the California Academy of Sciences Library

[[Category:19th-century American botanists]

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