Botanist Alice Eastwood (1859-1953) amassed a startlingly detailed amount of research on the flowering plants and herbs native to the California coast and the Colorado Rocky Mountains. It was her ardent collecting of plant specimens that helped establish a definitive classification table for the flora of North America.

Born on January 19, 1859, in Toronto, Canada, Eastwood was the daughter of Eliza Jane Gowdey and Colin Skinner Eastwood. Her father was the steward at the Toronto Asylum for the Insane in Ontario, and she lived on the grounds of the institution as a young child. Her paternal ancestry reached back several generations in Canada, and her grandfather had built the first paper mill in Ontario. When she was six, her mother died, and Eastwood took on many household duties involving her younger brother and sister. When their father began to suffer financial troubles, the children were taken in by relatives...