Lady Bird Johnson, who died yesterday at 94, added a touch of Texas hospitality to the White House and then to the nation as a whole through beautification projects that fought billboards and planted wildflowers along thousands of miles of the nation’s highways.

The daughter of a Texas rancher, Johnson spent 34 years in Washington as the remarkably devoted wife of Lyndon Baines Johnson as he served as a congressional secretary, U.S. representative, senator, vice-president, and, from 1963-1969, president.

If determined helpmeet was her primary role — she was the first woman to campaign solo for her husband for president and looked the other way during LBJ’s extramarital affairs — she was also a successful businesswoman in her own right who ran a profitable string of Texas radio stations.

Still, when asked to cite her greatest achievement, she once said, “Anything I did to keep Lyndon in good health and a good frame of mind to work as hard as he did.”

Claudia Alta Taylor was born December 12, 1912, in Karnack, a town of 100 population in northeast Texas. The youngest of three children, she got her nickname from a family servant who dubbed her “purty as a lady bird.”

In addition to running cattle, her father ran a store with the sign “T. J. Taylor, Dealer in Everything” over the door; the initials stood for “Thomas Jefferson.” She grew up cosseted but, especially after her mother died when she was just 5, alone. Despite a shy disposition, she excelled as a student, eventually finishing at the top of the University of Texas in Austin’s Class of 1933. The man who would become her husband had recently finished up at Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

Lyndon Johnson — then a Congressional aide — met Lady Bird over drinks one evening in Austin in 1934, and invited her to breakfast. He proposed the same day. They were married three months later. The ring he gave her cost $2.50 at Sears.

He won a seat in Congress on his first try, a 1937 special election for a seat vacated by death in a campaign bankrolled in part with money from Lady Bird’s mother’s estate. After LBJ became the first representative to don a uniform during World War II, Lady Bird ran his Washington office from 1941-1942.

The couple had a daughter, Luci, in 1944 and, after experiencing a series of miscarriages, Lady Bird gave birth to a healthy second daughter, Lynda, in 1947; the next year, LBJ won a election to the U.S. Senate in a squeaker. Lady Bird trained herself in public speaking and eventually became a model First Lady, a role that was thrust upon her unexpectedly by the assassination of President Kennedy.

In her book “A White House Diary,” she recalled seeing Jacqueline Kennedy with her husband’s blood still on her dress and leg. “Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights — that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood,” she wrote.

In 1964, her campaigning experience was put to perhaps its most severe test as she toured the South, solo, in the wake of her husband’s signing the Civil Rights Act, which was deeply unpopular among white southern voters.

Another highlight of her White House years was the $320 million Highway Beautification Bill, passed in 1965. After she made speeches and lobbied Congress, it became known as “The Lady Bird Bill.”

The Johnson White House years became increasingly dominated by the war in Vietnam; in her diary, she quoted LBJ thus: “I can’t get out. And I can’t finish it with what I have got. And I don’t know what the hell to do.” Johnson eventually declined to run in 1968, and the couple returned to Texas, where he died in 1973.

Lady Bird Johnson said her husband “bullied, shoved, pushed, and loved me into being more outgoing, more of an achiever. I gave him comfort, tenderness, and some judgment — at least I think I did.”

She spent her widowhood in Austin, where she and her daughters remained active in her wildflower advocacy and with the LBJ Library.