Women's History Month: Alice Eastwood
- Friends of Sausal Creek
- Mar 17
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 18
March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate and honor the contributions and achievements of women throughout history. This month, Friends of Sausal Creek would like to recognize Alice Eastwood, a key figure in western North American and California botany from the late 1800s through the mid 1900s. Over her career she would describe over 700 plant species, including pallid manzanita (Arctostaphylos pallida). The following is a brief biography of her life and contributions.
Alice was born on January 19, 1859, in Toronto, Canada. Her mother passed away when she was six years old. When her father left for the United States, Alice and her younger sister went to live with her Uncle Helliwell who was an experimental horticulturalist in Ontario, Canada. It was her uncle who first inspired her love of plants. Later, Alice and her sister would move into a convent where an elderly priest and gardener, Father Pugh, continued to encourage her interest in plants. At the age of 14, she moved to Denver, Colorado to live with her father. While in Colorado, she became a nanny for the Scherrer Family, who not only had an extensive library, but also brought Alice along on family camping trips into the Rocky Mountains where she began to first explore the vegetation of the region. Despite having to work multiple jobs to support her family, she graduated high school early as class valedictorian, receiving two books as graduation presents, which she used to teach herself botany.
After graduating from high school, she worked in Denver as a high school teacher instructing in Latin, natural sciences, drawing and composition, and literature. She spent her summers doing botanical explorations in the Rocky Mountains. By the time she was 28, she was well established as a notable botanist and had organized the only scientific plant collection of Colorado at the time. Today her collection is housed at the University of Colorado, Boulder Natural History Museum’s Herbarium. In 1890, she quit her teaching job to become a fulltime botanist. Her book Popular Flora of Denver, Colorado was published in 1893. While she was working on her book, Kate Brandegee, the curator at the California Academy of Sciences Herbarium in San Francisco invited Alice to become co-curator.
During the April 18, 1906 earthquake, Alice ran into the crumbling California Academy of Sciences building to rescue the Academy's plant collections. She was able to rescue 1,211 plant species of immense value, including many type specimens. She also saved many books from her colleague’s collections, including records dating back to 1853 when the Academy was first established. She said of the experience “Not a book [from my department] was I able to save, nor a single thing of my own, except my favorite lens, without which I should feel helpless... My own destroyed work I do not lament, for it was a joy to me while I did it, and I can still have the same joy in starting it again.”
Following the earthquake and the fire, she set about replacing the lost collections. Over her 57 years as curator, she collected 340,000 specimens for the herbarium and published over 300 articles, scientific papers, and books. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Arboretum and botanic garden in Golden Gate Park in 1938, a project which she had been working on for over ten years. She was also an important conservation advocate, and in 1926 she helped start the San Francisco Garden Club. She actively worked to save Redwood Creek Canyon, in what is today Muir Woods National Monument and Mt. Tamalpais State Park. She retired in 1949 at the age of 90, after 57 years with the California Academy of Sciences. She passed away at the age of 94 on October 30, 1953. Two genera of plants have since been named in her honor: Aliciella and Eastwoodia.
Alice Eastwood and Pallid Manzanita
As noted at the beginning, Alice Eastwood was the botanist who formally described the regional endemic Pallid Manzanita found only in the East Bay Hills of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. The description was published in Leaflets of Western Botany Volume 1, Number 8 on January 16, 1932. This was a botanical scientific journal that she and John Thomas Howell started at the California Academy of Sciences. The type specimen, the definitive reference plant sample for the classification and naming of a species taxonomically, was likely collected from the Sausal Creek watershed (the collection is described as being found on the summit of the east Oakland hills) by W. W. Carruth in January 1906. In her description, she notes that the new species resembles Heartleaf manzanita (Arctostaphylos andersonii), another rare endemic found in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but differs in the pale hue of the foliage among other differences, this she assigned the specific epithet to the new species pallida meaning pale.ard from 2012, created for the Oakland Museum of California's renovated Gallery of California Natural Sciences.
—Russell Huddleston, FOSC Board of Directors
