A Tribute to Alice Eastwood, 
11 
valley, crocus, tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. This new interest 
would have its most tangible manifestation when she helped to 
plan and plant Golden Gate Park, and the floral “Magic Carpet” 
on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay. 
California she eventually reached by accompanying and caring 
for an old lady with a broken hip whose destination was San 
Diego. This seaside town beloved by invalids became Alice East¬ 
wood’s temporary home. She was quite free to wander over mesas 
and explore the arroyos; and she carried two prized books with 
her, “Botany of the California Geological Survey,” which she 
had purchased from the Gray Herbarium, and Asa Gray’s own 
“Synoptical Flora.” She had read tantalizing scraps of the lives 
of early adventurer-botanists who collected along this coast. She 
resolved someday to fill in gaps of biographical information and 
write her own account of such intrepid scientists as Archibald 
Menzies, Thomas Coulter, Thomas Nuttall and the Scot, David 
Douglas, after whom so very many kinds of plants have been 
named. This study would take form and eventually be published 
as “Early Botanical Explorers on the Pacific Coast, and the Trees 
They Found There.” 
Alice Eastwood contributed to botanical magazines and met 
contemporary botanists of note like C. R. Orcutt and Daniel 
Cleveland, a pioneer San Diego botanist who had assisted Brewer 
orr the Geological Survey. With Kate Sessions, the well-known 
nursery-woman, she formed a lifelong friendship. But her new 
friends were not all botanically bent. In San Diego, as every¬ 
where else that she went, Alice Eastwood entered more than one 
world. 
