12 
The Perennial Adventure 
A specific study of trees (not to materialize until 1905 in “A 
Handbook of the Trees of California”) drew the young botanist 
north to Santa Cruz, where Menzies first sighted the Coast Red¬ 
wood. Breaking the trip was a stopover in Pasadena. Friends of 
friends took Miss Eastwood on a picnic to Altadena’s poppy 
fields 5 and also to call on Mrs. Ezra Carr at her home in “Car- 
melita Gardens,” near the intersection of Orange Grove Avenue 
and Colorado Street. Here, among plants and trees from all over 
the world, she saw her first Sequoia gigantea. This had been 
brought down from the Sierra and planted by John Muir, whose 
lifelong friend and mentor was Jeanne Carr. Wife of a one-time 
Berkeley professor, Mrs. Carr had friends in the Bay region to 
whom she referred her young visitor from Colorado. 
Santa Cruz lived up to expectations, as did redwood and ma- 
drone. But Alice Eastwood’s final goal was San Francisco. She 
arrived in mid-May, 1891? to find the California Academy of 
Sciences in the midst of moving to its own new headquarters on 
Market Street between Fifth and Sixth. The past fifteen years 
had been spent in inadequate, rented space. A new era of expan¬ 
sion seemed at hand, in which Botany as well as other Academy 
departments would be benefited. 
With characteristic directness and disregard of unimportant 
details, she pressed through the mess of moving and ascended to 
the sixth floor botanical work rooms. Quickly she found the 
people she wanted to find—Katharine Brandegee, Curator of 
Botany, and her husband with whom she edited and published the 
biological magazine Zoe> meaning “Life.” Miss Eastwood wanted 
to become a botanical writer and this already (in its second year) 
