Human Flower Project

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Flower Seed and Shutterbugs/Lady Bird Johnson

Former first lady and grandmother of Texas, Lady Bird Johnson died July 11, but not before seeding a nation with wildflowers.

Lyndon Johnson takes the oath of Presidential Office

November 22, 1963

Photo: Cecil Stoughton

At the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library here in Austin hangs the famous picture—LBJ, one hand raised, the other on the Bible,  head nearly touching the ceiling of Air Force One. To his left stands dazed and beautiful Jacqueline Kennedy, dark hair shining and falling over her eye, and to his right a squat little woman stares forward with resolve: Lady Bird. (Did anyone notice the vase of asters there?)

Mrs. Johnson died yesterday, age 94. Janet Wilson’s front page obituary for the Austin American Statesman is sumptuous. It even includes a tiny detail we thought might be left out—that there wasn’t one flower at the Johnsons’ wedding in November 1934.

Of course, Lady Bird made up for that. Her battle against the US billboard lobby and dedication to native plant conservation changed the public landscape, toning down the signage, and pouring on wildflowers. The grim picture from November 1963 is indelible as images go, but Mrs. Johnson, unlike so many in the public spotlight, managed to pursue a life beyond images. For us, a more accurate picture of her is this one, taken by Frank Wolfe in 1982. At the groundbreaking for the original Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Claudia Alta Johnson stands in a vortex of people, microphones and lenses and calmly casts out flower seed.

Seeding the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 1982

Photo: Frank Wolfe, via wiki

“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is one thing that all of us share.  Whatever its condition, it is, after all, a reflection of ourselves—our tastes, our aspirations, our successes, and our failures.  Fortunately, if we want to badly enough, we can do much to change what is not pleasurable to the eye and spirit.  Even in the poorest neighborhoods you can find a geranium in a coffee can, a window box set against the scaling side of a tenement, a border of roses struggling to live in a tiny patch of open ground.  Where flowers bloom, so does hope.”
—Lady Bird Johnson