Garden project blooms in honor of teen lost in gas pump fire

In an overgrown garden behind Miramont Castle, a crowd of people - many of them teens - donned dirty gloves and wielded clanking trowels as they tugged weeds from the garden beds, clearing the way for a colorful array of flowers and shrubs.

The odor of damp earth and mulch mingled with the scent of flowers. A soft breeze rustled the trees, accompanying the laughs coming from the crowd. On the far side of the valley, pine-covered peaks stood out against the blue sky.

It's a scene Whitney Hendrickson would have loved.

"She would want to be with us here today, with all the people planting the garden," said Wesley Hendrickson Whitney's 19-year-old twin brother. "We'll see the beauty of the garden and say it's growing the way she would be growing."

Three months ago, Whitney was killed in a fiery car crash at a west side Colorado Springs gas station. On Thursday morning, family, friends and teachers gathered to create a living memorial to the young woman who brought them so much happiness.

"She just brightened everybody's day with who she was," said Bonnie Poucel, her French teacher at Palmer High School, during a break from pulling weeds. "She was always in good humor, always liked to tell little jokes."

At age 16, Whitney began volunteering in the Victorian gardens behind Miramont Castle in Manitou Springs. With her longtime friend, Spencer Kellogg, she would ramble through the grounds talking to tourists and leap from the boulders at a shady end of the garden.

When she graduated from Palmer High School in 2008 and left for college in Iowa, she missed the mountains. She returned for a visit in March, taking a college friend to see the Miramont garden and the mountain views. On that visit home, she lost her life.

Soon after the funeral, Kelly Hunter, director of Miramont Castle Museum, was inspired to transform the garden in Whitney's memory.

"What I'm hearing from the community is this mattered to people," Hunter said. "This touched people, each in their own way. You hear the way people are so affected by this tragedy, they want to do something in their own way. And this gives something for people to do."

Hunter has commissioned a 3-foot-tall bronze statue of Whitney leaping in the air to place in the garden, and she hopes to raise money to cover the $2,500 in foundry fees.

But the colorful flowers are already in place, randomly arranged to form in a quilt of vibrant purples, reds and yellows - the bright, blooming varieties that Whitney would push her mother to plant in the family's garden at home, said her younger sister, Marina.

"It's kind of like crazy, but still pulled together and beautiful," said Marina. It's a good representation of Whitney."

To donate to the fund for the statue, send a check made out to the Manitou Springs Historical Society to Miramont Castle, 9 Capitol Ave., Manitou Springs 80829. Specify "Whitney's statue" on the check.
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