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Elizabeth "Betty" Martha Biber, mother of five and a longtime resident of Woodside, used to take pleasure in walking in the woods with her kids and their friends, naming plants and animals as she went along.

"We would all go hiking and she would know the names of many of the flora and fauna," Ms. Biber's daughter Linda Triplett of La Honda said. "She loved to hike (and) she was a real avid birdwatcher."

At home on Jane Drive in Woodside Knolls, and surrounded by her family, Ms. Biber died on March 16. She was 94.

Ms. Biber grew up in San Francisco, graduated from Presentation High School, and worked for a time as a dental hygienist, her daughter said. She married Paul E. Biber in 1939; the couple built a house in Woodside in 1956 and settled into a semi-rural life. "She was a very beautiful woman, but she never wanted to be a socialite," Ms. Triplett said. "She never went to a beauty salon, she never had her nails done."

The Biber home was like a country club for kids, Ms. Triplett recalled. Sleepovers were common and longer stays not uncommon. A Redwood City friend once needed shelter when her mother abandoned her in her senior year in high school; she stayed for two years, Ms. Triplett said.

"Everyone was welcome for a chat, a swim, a horseback ride or a meal," Ms. Triplett said. "This welcome often lasted for days or weeks. Holidays always had extra guests who sometimes had no other place to celebrate the day."

Her mother could light up a room with laughter, Ms. Triplett said. "It was a very lively household for years and years and years."

And lively, too, being in her company, given her sense of herself. "She would sit in church and if she didn't like the guy who was talking, she would put in ear plugs and sit there and look quite pleasant," Ms. Triplett said. "She lived according to her own bible."

Mr. Biber died in 1978. In recalling the services, Ms. Triplett remembered her mother, in the presence of her husband's casket, asking the funeral director: "Don't you have tubes that you could just drop him into the earth and save room?"

Environmental issues were important to her. She worked hard to help incorporate the town so as to preserve its rural character, her daughter said. While Interstate 280 was in the planning stages, Ms. Biber involved herself in preserving the mineral-deprived serpentine soil and the unique habitat it created along the freeway corridor.

On vacations "all over California," Ms. Biber would lead family and friends on hikes, singing around the campfire, swimming in rivers and sometimes fishing, her daughter said.

Ms. Biber is survived by her son Paul; daughters Linda Triplett, Betsy Biber and Heidi Biber; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A memorial gathering is set for the afternoon of Saturday, June 16, at the family home.

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