Alberta Virginia Seymour (neé Garrard) of Nevada City died peacefully on Aug. 11 in Grass Valley after a lengthy illness. She was 98.

A funeral service will be held at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Nevada City, with burial following at North Bloomfield Cemetery.

Alberta was born in Oakland on November 7, 1927, and grew up as a shy only child in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Los Altos. In addition to being homeschooled, she attended the Castilleja School for girls in Palo Alto, graduating from Mountain View High School in 1945 after meeting the person she described as her “true love and sweetheart”: fellow student Peter Owen Seymour, whom she married on Nov. 26, 1946.

Before starting a family, Alberta and Peter attended San Jose State University, where they studied English. With or without children in tow in the Bay Area, and after achieving their dream of retiring to the Gold Country, they roamed the woodlands and historic towns of California, exulting in back roads, old houses, and what they referred to as John Muir’s “gospel of the wilderness.” Peter preceded Alberta in death in 2010.
She was a member of Trinity Episcopal Church.

Alberta was a lifelong lover of poetry, art, books, animals, California history, and the beauty of the natural world. Her deep Christian faith began in childhood. A voracious reader and writer, she was fiercely intelligent, authentically wholesome, eloquent and expressive, introverted and kind, and amazed at the beauty of life. She loved her family and small circle of lifelong friends unfailingly, forgave easily, and saw the positive in everything without seeming to try.

She will be missed.

Mrs. Seymour is survived by her children, Gregory, Joel, Brian, and Sylvia, plus seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the California Native Plant Society.

The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses