In Louisiana, Planting Seeds of Memory

In Vermont, a jury was concluding that a father of three had raped and killed a student from Arlington. On the same day last month, almost 20 people arrived in New Orleans to keep Michelle Gardner-Quinn's dreams alive.

They came bearing sunflower seeds. More than a dozen H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program students and four adults were there, honoring the graduate and the ecological cause she so cherished.

"Michelle was a budding environmentalist," said Gail Fendley, whose son Ian Willson was a close friend of Gardner-Quinn's. "She traveled all over -- Costa Rica, Brazil, South Africa -- with her environmental studies. We're carrying out some of the work that we think Michelle would have done had she lived."

Shortly after Gardner-Quinn was slain about 19 months ago, her family and friends formed Michelle's Earth Foundation. Its main focus has been in New Orleans, a city she fell in love with when she worked there in the months before she died. The group has planted more than 25,000 sunflower seeds in dozens of locations across the city, citing the flower's ability to leach lead out of polluted soil.

"This project has helped me get through a lot," said Willson, 24, who has been working in New Orleans on the sunflower project for much of 2008. "It's helped a lot of people in a lot of ways. And it's helped carry Michelle's name forward in a positive way."

Willson met Gardner-Quinn at a summer enrichment camp at the University of Virginia when the two were in middle school. The two dated for several years, and in the summer of 2006, they volunteered in New Orleans at a relief center for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"She fell in love with New Orleans completely during that summer," Willson said. "She would like that we're doing this. It's been a great idea."

Soon afterward, Gardner-Quinn transferred to the University of Vermont, after attending several other colleges. She was a senior majoring in Latin American studies and environmental sciences.

That fall, she wrote an essay called "This I Believe" for a class. It begins: "I believe in upholding reverence for all life. I believe that humanity has a responsibility to the earth and to the life that we share our experience with."

Later, she writes: "The reality of climate change is here and now; it is the environmental battle of our generation and generations to come. In honor of all life, I am dedicating myself to preventing this worldwide ecological crisis."

Gardner-Quinn was reported missing on Oct. 7, 2006, when she didn't return to her dorm after a night out with friends. Her body was found six days later near a swimming hole about 15 miles southeast of the university's Burlington campus. She was 21.

On May 22 in Rutland, Vt., a jury deliberated for five hours before convicting Brian Rooney, a 37-year-old construction worker, of raping and strangling Gardner-Quinn after meeting her in a chance encounter. A surveillance camera outside a Burlington jewelry store recorded the two walking together up Main Street toward campus the night she went missing. Rooney told police that Gardner-Quinn had borrowed his cellphone after hers quit working. Rooney faces a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Willson said the verdict, though not a surprise, "was a shock, in a good way."

"It was a little overwhelming," he said from New Orleans. "I wouldn't say it brought closure, because I had that already. But it made me very emotional."

Willson and the other volunteers were in New Orleans only temporarily, but the part of Michelle's Earth Foundation called MESUNOLA, or Michelle's Earth Sunflowers in New Orleans, will continue.

"From now on, every time I see a sunflower I will think about the young Burlington, Vermont woman that the wonderful volunteers have planted them for," said Howard Mielke, who has studied lead contamination in New Orleans for years.

"The sunflowers are a living memorial honoring and reminding us of many losses," Mielke said in a statement released by the foundation.

Willson said the all-volunteer group formed in his friend's honor welcomes help. Anyone wanting information on Michelle's Earth Foundation can visit http://www.michellesearth.org.