The Perennial Adventure 
A Tribute to Alice Eastwood 
There is a simplicity and an inevitability in Alice Eastwood’s 
life history. Everything, even disappointment, became grist for 
her ever-grinding inner mill. Everybody who entered her life, 
even briefly, seemed to contribute eventually to the creation of 
this integrated personality. A botanical analogy can be drawn 
from the three distinct eras of a long lifetime. In the Canadian 
childhood was planted the seed of a true vocation ; in Colorado 
this seed rooted and sprouted in the dark ground of poverty and 
hardship; in California it flowered for all the world to see. 
Her biographer tells us that Alice Eastwood was the only 
woman starred for distinction in every volume of “American 
Men of Science,” published during her lifetime. Her most prized 
citation came the year of her retirement, in the form of an invita¬ 
tion to serve as Honorary President of the Seventh International 
Botanical Congress, meeting in Sweden in 1950. There she went, 
flying alone at the age of ninety-one! Though feted in queenly 
fashion, her happiest moment was not one of personal tribute. 
It happened during a day of pilgrimage to the home of Carolus 
Linnaeus, the great eighteenth century scholar. Here she, small 
and frail, was invited to sit in the ancient chair which he used 
while writing the source book of modern systematic botany. 
Miss Eastwood’s traveling hat is noteworthy. She who once 
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