Virtual Northwest Flower & Garden Show

The Virtual Northwest Flower and Garden Show starts on Friday! We are reminiscing on last years show with photos of our display, "Alice's Woodland". Paying tribute to Alice Eastwood, a self-taught botanist and women of science. ⁠Designed by Juli Bertucci and the other strong women at Urban Earth Nursery.

⁠Recipient of the City Living People's Choice Award⁠

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The Virtual Garden Show runs from 2/19-2/22. We are offering a special discount to everyone who shops with us during the show - simply search Urban Earth for the promo code.⁠

“Alice’s Woodland” a dedication to Alice Eastwood

As a young girl, Alice Eastwood spent her family vacations rambling the hills of Colorado gathering botanical specimens; the first step of a mania for collection that would net hundreds of thousands of samples stretched across six decades.

Her early botanical work was part of California’s storied age, when the only way to get rare desert plants was to load up a horse and ride into the unknown. On those excursions, she collected specimens and discovered several plants, including Eastwood's willow and Hickman's potentilla.

In 1894 she became the Curator of Botany at Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, a post she would hold officially until 1949. In 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake set the city ablaze. Eastwood ran into the burning Academy of Sciences to retrieve the treasure trove of specimens she has spent her life collecting and organizing for the institution. Having saved 1,497 crucial specimens from the fire, she then set about the task of rebuilding the remainder of the collection. Within four decades, the 1,497 specimens she saved grew to 300,000.

Eastwood wrote over three hundred botanical articles and books that gave the shrubs and flowers everyday life personalities, that let people see the charm in plants that she saw, creating a city-wide enthusiasm for flora that spawned a Fuchsia Society, an Orchid Society, a Mt. Tamalpais conservation society, a wildflower society, and which transformed Golden Gate Park into one of the world’s most enthusiastically maintained botanical sites in the country. Along with several buildings and gardens named in her honor, in 1903 Alice Eastwood was one of only two of the few women listed in American Men of Science, as being considered to be among the top 25 percent of professionals in their discipline.