Honoring Alice Eastwood’s Legacy at CU's Herbarium
Specimen: Primula parryi A. Gray (Parry’s Primrose)
- Location: Grays Peak, Colorado
- Habitat: Found along streams and in moist meadows in the Rocky Mountain subalpine to alpine regions
- Aroma: Has a skunky odor
- Collected: July 1888 by Alice Eastwood
The University of Colorado Herbarium houses the world’s most complete documentation of Colorado flora. Located in the basement of the Clare Small Arts and Sciences building, the herbarium’s collection contains nearly 600,000 specimens of vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens and fungi.
The herbarium’s founding collection dates to the 1880s and belonged to Alice Eastwood, a self-taught plant scientist. During her life, she named 395 species — the fourth-highest of any female scientist.
Eastwood, who served as a teacher in Kiowa, Colorado, spent her summers collecting plants in the mountains. In the preface of her 1893 book, A Popular Flora of Denver, Colorado, Eastwood wrote that she created the publication “with the sole aim of helping students to learn the names of the plants that grow around Denver.” Her collection lived in the Colorado State Historical Society until CU Boulder’s herbarium, which is part of the university’s Museum of Natural History, acquired it under curator William Weber in the 1940s.
Today, Eastwood’s specimens, along with hundreds of thousands of others, support research on and of campus — even internationally. The robust collections are often toured by CU students, faculty, botanists, scholars and local plant enthusiasts.
Said botany collection manager Amber Horning: “I believe that natural history collections have the power to inspire an audience of all ages and backgrounds.”
Photo courtesy University of Colorado Herbarium (COLO)