Beth Callaway championed wildflowers with Lady Bird Johnson

By J.E. Geshwiler

For the AJC

Some people hug trees. Beth Callaway embraced flowers, especially the wild varieties. She studied them with an academic’s curiosity. She photographed them like a professional. She championed them alongside America’s leading wildflower advocate, Lady Bird Johnson.

“Beth Callaway was a take-charge woman, and when she gave her heart to Mother Nature, you knew that native plants and the environment were better off,” said Lynda Bird Johnson Robb of McLean, Va., daughter of the late First Lady.

From her positions at her husband’s family’s Callaway Gardens, the National Arboretum in Washington and Mrs. Johnson’s Wildflower Center in Austin. Texas, Mrs. Callaway laid the ground for a wider appreciation and distribution of native plants.

“As Georgians travel the state’s highways and enjoy the masses of wildflowers along the roadsides, they can thank Beth Callaway and former First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter for leading this kind of beautification,” said a family friend, former CNN Chairman Tom Johnson of Atlanta.

Laura Elizabeth (Beth) Callaway, 83, of Pine Mountain, died Tuesday at the Spring Harbor assisted living community in Columbus, Ga., from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Her funeral mass is at 10 a.m. Saturday at Christ the King Catholic Church in Pine Mountain. A memorial organ concert is scheduled from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Saturday at the Ida Cason Callaway Memorial Chapel at Callaway Gardens. Striffler-Hamby Mortuary in LaGrange is in charge of arrangements.

Born and reared in the west Georgia town of Hamilton, Mrs. Callaway attended Agnes Scott College, graduating with degrees in math and chemistry – “not your usual women’s majors back in the 1940s,” said her daughter, Virginia Martin of Toronto. After a year of working as a chemist, she married Howard (Bo) Callaway, whom she had known since sixth grade in Hamilton.

As a mother, she became something of a lioness. After her husband was elected to Congress in November 1964, she had the near impossible task of getting her five children into the most desirable Washington-area schools in January, in the middle of the school term.

“She was undaunted,” Mrs. Martin said. “She would march us kids into a principal’s office and say, ‘Look at these fine children. They’ll be a credit to your school.’ And, by golly, she got all five of us in.”

“While she was fiercely protective of us, she also encouraged us to be independent and pursue our dreams,” Mrs. Martin continued. “She let my sister train a high-strung horse that later became an Olympic entrant, and she let me go to Italy by myself at age 16 to study art because she understood I would be better off there than starting college early.”

With her children grown , she went back to school and earned a master’s degree at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo. “She already knew many native plants. From that point on, she knew their Latin names, too,” her husband said.

The Callaways and their children often flew to Colorado where they loved to ski and where he acquired Crested Butte Mountain Resort. “Bo piloted his family on so many trips out west and elsewhere that Beth learned to fly so she could land the plane if something ever happened to him,” said Toni Laird of Sea Island, Ga., a family friend.

Mrs. Callaway learned to love to pilot herself, her husband said -- not so much to fly to various destinations, but just to go up for a relaxing joyride.

Photography was long a passion. “Beth had a talented eye and was very knowledgeable about lighting and all kinds of equipment. She called herself a belly-photographer because she spent a lot ot time flat on the ground doing close-ups of flowers,” her husband said.

Survivors include another daughter, Elizabeth Considine of Denver; three sons, Howard Callaway Jr. of Bristol, Va., Edward Callaway of Hamilton, Ga., and Ralph Callaway of Columbus, 16 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.