Lady Bird Johnson, former first lady and widow of America’s 36th President Lyndon B. Johnson, passed away Wednesday, aged 94.

Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson, born in 1912 and wife to president Lyndon B. Johnson for 39 years, until his death in 1973, was affectionately nicknamed Lady Bird from early childhood. The moniker would stay with her for the rest of her life.

Lady Bird will perhaps be best remembered as a great lover of nature, of the environment, of wildflowers. Despite the stormy years of the Vietnam war and President Johnson’s growing unpopularity, she remained a beloved figure in America.

Often considered an environmentalist before her time, Lady Bird made great efforts to raise public awareness about conservation. She advocated for the preservation of North America’s native plants and native landscape and encouraged Americans to care for their surroundings.

She initiated a capital beautification project in Washington DC, which soon multiplied across the country, as others found her idea inspiring. In 1965, Congress passed the Highway Beautification Act, nicknamed the “Lady Bird” act in recognition for her great efforts to getting it passed.

The US broadcasting corporation quoted a 1965 entry in her diary: “Getting on the subject of beautification is like picking up a tangled skein of wool. All the threads are interwoven - recreation and pollution and mental health, and the crime rate, and rapid transit, and highway beautification, and the war on poverty, and parks - national, state and local.”

“It is hard to hitch the conversation into one straight line, because everything leads to something else,” she wrote.

Lady Bird, a widow since 1973, died at age 94 on Wednesday.