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By Nicole Seiferth

St.Margaret's House is a modest 20-story apartment building sandwiched between the Financial District and the South Street Seaport. It's a non-descript building from the front— a concrete high-rise in a city full of them, dwarfed by the massive skyscrapers that fill the Lower Manhattan skyline. But if you walk through the front doors, past the sunny atriumwhere residents sit and chat in Chinese and a handful of other languages, past the busy cafeteria that serves lunch to both residents and stockbrokers, you'll come to the unexpected heart of this community: St.Margaret's secret garden.

Many of the residents are Chinese,many of the others were immigrants fromother parts of the world. Joe Breed, St.Margaret's executive director and, perhaps as importantly, its unofficial gardener, says that the residents gather in the lobby, cafeteria, and garden the same way they did in their New York neighborhoods when they were younger. "If you go to the old cultural neighborhoods, you still find women hanging out the windows, sitting on the steps, chit-chatting,watching the children.The men gather on the corners of the streets and talk and watch other people, watching life go on. It's like a theater.When they come to St.Margaret's House, they want to do what they've always done: sit, gossip and chat, watch things.The garden fits so well into that, because it's a place where they can sit and observe what's going on in other people's lives."

The garden is enclosed on three sides by high cement walls which are barely discernible through the profusion of trees, shrubs, and bushes that grow near the perimeter. The flower beds are designed on a slight incline; look up, and you can almost imagine you've entered a small forest—a wondrous feeling in a city where steel and glass office buildings are usually the dominant overhead feature. Mr. Breed, as the residents formally but affectionately call him, gives a flowering rose bush the once-over, and says that it was the particular favorite of a resident who passed away several years ago. ("She couldn't care less about the rest of the garden, just her rose bush,"he recalls, laughing.) The rose bush's audacious neighbors are a riot of fluffy pink and blue hydrangeas which all started out asMother's Day and birthday presents given to various residents.Moving on, he comes to a patch of small, nondescript plants."Down here,we're starting clematis. They'll have nice, showy flowers with very bright colors—red and a kind of bluish purple. I like to include a lot of red in the garden because red and orange are the last colors the elderly lose in their vision."

On a typical day at St.Margaret's, a group of residents practice tai chi in the garden in the early morning. Later in the day,Mr. Breed goes out to transfer plants fromhis corner "nursery" into the garden proper. While he's working, a resident comes out to chat, and give hima few pointers.An elderly gentleman offers to help andMr. Breed hands him a hose, pointing to a few rose bushes that need some water.Others watch fromtheir apartment windows.

The garden,Mr.Breed says,makes him approachable."It makes me vulnerable with a population that is highly vulnerable.Community members who are in trouble will suddenly appear in the garden and introduce the idea thatmaybe they need some help in their home.They take their first steps towards finding help in the garden."

As we leave the garden after my tour, he points across the middle island to a small, unassuming tree on the opposite side. "We have a resident whose son committed suicide. She came to me, six months into her mourning period, and said, ‘I have one tree left that was given to me in memory of my son. Could you help me with this tree?'"

The tree is six feet tall now, spindly and fragile-looking but, according to Mr. Breed, it's healthy. "She watches that tree carefully," he says. "The whole House watches that tree. It represents that woman's son. I will never really understand fully the meaning of that to her."

Nicole Seiferth is managing editor of Trinity News. St. Margaret's House is an independent living facility for the elderly and mobility-impaired built and sponsored by Trinity Wall Street.

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