Eastwood, Alice (1859-1953)

US botanist who provided critical specimens for professional botanists as well as advising travellers on methods of plant collecting and arousing popular support for saving native species. Eastwood studied plants in the Colorado Mountains while working as a schoolteacher. In 1892, she went to the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, where she became curator of the herbarium and founded and ran the California Botanical Club. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, she spent years rebuilding the collections, involving field trips to the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada and visits to botanical gardens around the world. Between 1912 and her retirement 1949, over 340,000 specimens were added to the herbarium. Eastwood's early fieldwork led to the publication of A Handbook of the Trees of California 1905.