Dr. Lillian Chou seems like an unlikely guerrilla gardener and her garden seems like an unlikely place to transform the lives of her patients.

She’s a radiation oncologist and her garden, located in the parking lot of the Medical Center-based Aurora Breast Center cancer clinic that she owns with her husband, Dr. Peter Ming-Tao Ho, isn’t particularly impressive — at least at first glance. The half-dozen or so metal water troughs were overflowing one recent morning with what looked like various weeds.

About the only thing I immediately recognized was the olive tree, and only because I have one in my own yard.

But Chou’s enthusiasm is contagious and the power of this fledgling garden, which she set up in 2014, is in how it demonstrates the viability of growing food in the middle of the city.

As she showed me around, she was like a hummingbird, alighting on each plant for a few moments at a time to explain which parts are edible, how they’re prepared and the nutritional properties of each.

There was a peach tree (how’d I miss that?) that last year produced 50 fruits. A mandarin orange plant from which she said her patients liked to pick and the leaves of which can be used like bay leaves to flavor dishes.

The lemongrass, she explains, can be used in soups, the onion leaves work to flavor rice and the nopal can be added to salads and scrambled eggs.

Even the olive tree had a use beyond the fruit that’s ripening on the branches.

“You can use dried olive leaves to make a nice tea,” she said.

There was more, but then this column would have to run over this entire page.

In addition to growing edible plants, the garden serves as a gentle connection with her cancer patients and their families, most of whom are walking what is likely the most difficult path of their lives.

She tells the story of the woman in her 70s, the wife of a patient, who made rosemary potatoes, but had never seen a rosemary bush before.

“Do you have one?” she asked Chou.

“She lived in an apartment and never had a garden, so I showed her our rosemary bush,” said Chou. “She asked me, ‘How do you harvest it?’ When I showed her how easy it was, she must have taken a half pound of rosemary home with her.”

Another patient — a guerrilla gardener herself, apparently — solved an office mystery when she admitted to planting several lettuce plants in the garden.

“The employees loved it because they’d come down and pick a few leaves to add to their sandwiches at lunch.”

Then there was the woman, a World War II war bride from Austria, who asked Chou if she could take some of the garlic chives because she liked the flavor. In exchange, she planted some parsley that grows in the garden still.

“I’m sure she is adding garlic chives to all her favorite dishes now that she has the plants in her garden.”

Chou knows firsthand the soothing effects gardening can have during a health crisis. In 2004 she was diagnosed with breast cancer — a “shocking” diagnosis considering no one in her family had ever had the disease.

She said spending quiet time working in the garden helped her cope with the fear and stress of her treatment. Happily, she is now one of the 50 percent of cancer patients whose disease is considered cured.

In addition to the one at Aurora, Chou also has edible gardens at a medical office and several rental homes she owns in Lubbock and at a mental health treatment facility in Nashville. She owns a 13-acre organic avocado and lemon grove in California and small farms in Lubbock (peach, jujube), Bayview (grapefruit) and Tainan in her birthplace of Taiwan (banana, mango and other tropical fruit).

If the idea of planting and cultivating an urban food garden is daunting, Chou said you can participate in the movement “without lifting a finger.”

“It can be as simple as buying from a farmers market or, if you’re in the supermarket, buying produce that’s grown locally and organically,” she said.

Urban gardening also means reducing your carbon footprint and reducing food waste. If you eat a watermelon and don’t eat the rind — which, she told me, is edible (who knew?) — you should give it to a friend who raises chickens, which apparently love watermelon rind. No chicken-raising friends? Compost it.

Chou laughed when I asked if she could recommend any books or magazines for someone who wants to get into urban gardening.

“Just Google ‘How to start an urban garden,’” she said. “Or go to YouTube. There are plenty of videos.” (She’s right.)

As we parted, she gifted me with a beautiful peach from one of her rental houses in Lubbock where she’d been the day before and one sweet-smelling Meyer lemon from the farm in California.

“I carry produce in my carry-on when I travel,” she explained. “I maximize savings and eat better that way.”

rmarini@express-news.net

Twitter: @RichardMarini