Alice Eastwood and Reezy Plaskett: The Plants of the Plaskett Coast

Alice Eastwood — Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, and one of the great botanists of the American West — came to botanize the Santa Lucias, and the Plasketts of Pacific Valley were her hosts. She stayed at the family home; she is remembered on the coast for her book California Coast.

What made the visit lasting was Reason Alpha Plaskett. A carpenter and homesteader’s son with a self-taught passion for the local flora, “Reezy” began sending Eastwood specimens from the coast in December 1897 and kept it up through at least April 1898. In under five months of collecting, his specimens yielded at least six plants Eastwood judged new to science — an extraordinary return for an amateur working one stretch of coast.

She named two of them for him:

• Nemophila plaskettii — a small woodland nemophila
• Linanthus plaskettii — a delicate coastal flower

Botany has since folded both into earlier-named species (Nemophila parviflora and Leptosiphon parviflorus), as botany often does — but the names stand in the literature, in Eastwood’s hand, honoring a Big Sur carpenter who noticed things.

Two of Reason’s discoveries survived the scrutiny under their own names, and both are still good species today:

• Ribes sericeum — the Santa Lucia Gooseberry, described from the specimen Reason collected at Spruce Creek in December 1897
• Ribes menziesii var. hystrix — the Porcupine Gooseberry, from his specimen collected at Gorda in January 1898

(A third, Ribes sericeum var. viridescens, Eastwood thought distinct enough to name; that one didn’t endure.)

So the family name is written on the coast three ways: on the creeks and ridges the maps show, in the deeds the county keeps — and in the flora of California itself, where a gooseberry from Spruce Creek still carries the description a Plaskett’s eye first earned it.