A Tribute to Alice Eastwood 
9 
back in time. At Oshawa she found the orchard cut down, Father 
Pugh nowhere about, and no Sisters she knew in the convent. She 
then visited Newburyport, met and enjoyed friends of her step¬ 
mother and, eventually, found her way into the inner circle of 
Cambridge scholars. The Gray Herbarium was on her itinerary, 
and Asa Gray she met in his own garden. The Botany written by 
this renowned Harvard professor had been her constant com¬ 
panion during all her summers in the Colorado mountains. With 
the simplicity and generosity of true greatness, Dr. Gray en¬ 
couraged his admirer to tell him of her own tiny discoveries, and 
fired her with true botanical zeal. Alice Eastwood could see, from 
the eminence of this Cambridge garden, that her mountain time 
had been play time until now. 
Back home again, her most rewarding expedition occurred 
when she guided the English naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, 
up Grays Peak during alpine flowering season. She possessed his 
monumental “Malay Archipelago,” and was awed by his exten¬ 
sive and penetrative knowledge of distant oceanic islands. Dar¬ 
win’s contemporary who had designated the “Wallace Line” 
separating the flora and fauna of Asia and Australia—this world 
figure interrupted his American lecture tour to go skylarking in 
the Rockies with a young woman in her twenties, as yet unknown 
to the world! The catalyzer in this unlikely episode was the high 
school principal, James Baker, who recognized the two as con¬ 
genial spirits—though separated by forty years in age, a conti¬ 
nent and an ocean in locale. 
During a complete decade Alice Eastwood divided her life 
between avocation (at which she earned her living) and vocation 
