Lady Bird Johnson Is Still Blossoming at 75

As Lady Bird Johnson celebrates her 75th birthday, she is as devoted as ever to her family and to the American wildflowers whose popularity she has worked so hard to cultivate.

Each spring Washington blooms with the thousands of dogwoods and daffodils she planted as first lady, House Beautiful noted in an article in its current issue, but Johnson has gone on to even more ambitious projects.

On her 70th birthday, she threw her “hat over the windmill” and launched a long-dreamed-of project--the National Wildflower Research Center. In five years its membership has grown to nearly 9,000.

The center researches America’s native plants--only 200 of the nation’s 25,000 wildflower species have been studied seriously--and encourages their use.

Johnson and Carlton B. Lees have written “Wildflowers Across America,” to be published in 1988, which will benefit the center.

Johnson, who experiments with wildflower plantings on 16 acres at her ranch near Austin, Tex., also tries to encourage planting wildflowers on roadsides.

Each year she throws a big barbecue for the Texas highway foremen who have done the most to spread wildflowers, using them to cover bare spots instead of planting grass.

Not only does this beautify the highways, it saves the state some $8 million annually because the flowers do not require mowing.

In addition to her work with wildflowers, she keeps up with friends and family--daughters Lynda Robb in Virginia and Luci Nugent Turpin in Toronto, their husbands and children. She takes individual trips with each grandchild, going rafting with grandson Lyndon or visiting the Statue of Liberty with Claudia Taylor Nugent.

“When my daughter Lynda and her husband, Chuck (Charles Robb, former governor of Virginia) moved into their new house in Virginia--a beautiful place looking into treetops above the murmur and roar of the Potomac--they said I had to decide what to put on the walls in my room,” Johnson said. “It’s simply their best guest room, but they very kindly call it mine.

“I wanted a picture of young, handsome Lyndon, a picture from 1934 when we were courting.”

She also wanted pictures of homes she loved, including two of her ranch.

“Of course I chose a picture of the White House,” she said. “The photograph shows me in front of the fence and fountain, pushing our first grandchild’s baby carriage.”

Also included was a picture of the Brick House, where she was born and spent her first 21 years until she left it to be married in 1934.

She also selected vacation homes, including an Acapulco house owned by former Mexican President Miguel Aleman.

“We were packing our suitcases to go in January, 1973, when Lyndon died,” she said. “President Aleman came to the funeral and later, to my great amazement, wrote me that he wanted the family to continue to use it, and we did.”

Another favorite vacation home was one she rented in Florence, Italy.