W SUSTAINABLE GARDENING
SUSTAINABLE GARDENING TREATING PATIENTS WITH SUSTAINABLE LIVING By SHARI BIEDIgER
W
PHOTOgRAPHy By EBER gUERRERO
hen this doctor tells you to eat right and exercise, you only need
walk outside the clinic door to take a step in that direction.
It’s there, in the great outdoors of a San Antonio Medical Center parking lot, that Dr. Lillian Chou and her staff at the Aurora Cancer Center grow everything from olive trees and cactus to herbs and vegetables in galvanized watering troughs and window boxes and, in fact, anywhere there’s a mound of dirt.
“If you have sunshine, you can grow food,” Chou says. But while her patients are free to clip a sprig of rosemary, harvest a few peppers or pick a peach from the branches of her urban orchard, Chou’s gardens are more than food. They are meant to inspire sustainable living. “There are many ways you can do your part, but the best way is an edible garden,” Chou says. “The rain and sun are what heaven gave us. The leaves are the solar panels. The plants collect water naturally.” It’s a way of life for Chou that began when she was growing up in Taiwan. Her dad was a teacher, so the family of eight grew a garden to supplement their food sources, and her mother loved to cook what they grew. “In Asia, we don’t plant things just for aesthetics, even though many food plants are aesthetically pleasing,” she says. “In Taiwan, a fruit tree is also a shade tree.” fitting in, chopped the trees down. “Only one pear tree escaped,” says Chou came to San Antonio when she was 27 years old to attend a res-
Chou, but that didn’t deter her.
idency program in radiation oncology at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center, then moved to Houston, where she met her husband.
Going behind his back, she purchased 259 acres — “a sad chemical
They bought their first home in a nice neighborhood in Lubbock, and
farm that grew cotton every year” — and started the city’s first organic
Chou planted peach and pear trees.
farm, growing peaches, pomegranates and jujubes, working toward her dream of sustainability and education. Chou invited groups of stu-
“When they were blooming, it was very beautiful. But in 1989, nobody
dents from local schools to visit the farm on Earth Day and helped
would have edible plants in the front yard, and they hired others to
them plant their own edible schoolyard gardens.
work in the yard for them,” Chou says. Her husband, concerned about
Today, she grows food on acreage she owns in South Texas (ruby red
44 | sawoman.com