Friends: 
How grateful we should be to those responsible for this beauti¬ 
ful little volume that is so adequate a tribute to Alice Eastwood! 
Members of the Marin Garden Club first thought of this way of 
honoring the memory of their dear friend. In executing their 
plan, they have had the advice and cooperation of the officers of 
the California Academy of Sciences. The entire proceeds are as¬ 
signed to the Alice Eastwood Hall of Botany Fund. To Mr. 
Lawton Kennedy goes the credit for his dedicated service in mak¬ 
ing this volume so quickly available and for embodying the text 
in so choice a manner, and to John Falter for enhancing it with 
two delightful drawings. 
I should like to emphasize the adequateness of this little book: 
first, by telling you something Miss Eastwood would never have 
said; and second, by telling you something Miss Eastwood did 
say. 
No member of a botany class or a garden club ever heard Miss 
Eastwood refuse to examine a plant with the disparaging remark, 
“Oh, I’ve seen that flower before.” Whenever or wherever she 
might have been shown a flower, no matter how common and how 
weedy, the truth and the beauty exhibited by the structural for¬ 
mation of that flower would have at once inspired a spirited lesson 
on what she saw and what it meant, just as if she had never before 
seen so common a weed. It was this appreciation of truth and 
beauty in all botanical manifestations that was the foremost prin¬ 
ciple of her life. In her high school valedictory that is reprinted 
in this volume, she set truth and the search of truth as the loadstar 
