{"id":470563,"date":"2026-09-21T03:58:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T03:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/470563\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T03:58:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T03:58:24","slug":"meet-the-man-curating-dodger-stadiums-popular-botanic-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/470563\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the man curating Dodger Stadium’s popular botanic garden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tens of thousands of people walk in and out of Dodger Stadium<\/a> on any given night, paying scant attention to the trees, plants, and other foliage surrounding it on all sides. Chaz Perea made his peace with that a long time ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting to Dodger Stadium is not a small thing,\u201d said Perea, 41, the stadium\u2019s landscape manager. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to park in this monster,\u201d he said, motioning to the acres of asphalt around him, \u201cand then go find your seat in that monster.\u201d<\/p>\n

1 <\/p>\n

\"The <\/p>\n

2 <\/p>\n

\"Dodgers <\/p>\n

3 <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

1. The agave garden sits outside Lot B at Dodger Stadium on Friday. (Gina Ferazzi\/Los Angeles Times) 2. Dodgers fans walk past vibrant plants behind photos of former Dodgerss outside center field at Dodger Stadium on Friday. (Gina Ferazzi\/Los Angeles Times) 3. A group visits agave island during a tour of Dodger Stadium\u2019s botanic garden on Tuesday. (Christina House\/Los Angeles Times) <\/p>\n

For the past 17 years, Perea and his four-person crew have been responsible for every bit of stadium landscaping that isn\u2019t the field itself. That\u2019s roughly 300 acres, encompassing the parking lots, the hillsides meeting the 110 Freeway, and 149 concrete planters nicknamed \u201cmartinis\u201d for their glass-like shape. The planters are original to the stadium\u2019s 1962 construction, and many had crumbled badly enough over the decades to need painstaking repair.<\/p>\n

The landscaping isn\u2019t just about plants and planters. Behind a fence beyond the iconic orange 76 ball in the parking lot once sat a hidden garden. Its centerpiece was an eight-foot-tall stone lantern given to then-Dodgers owner Walter O\u2019Malley<\/a> by Japanese sports columnist Sotaro Suzuki and his wife, Toku, who had attended the stadium\u2019s grand opening in 1962. Suzuki commissioned the 3,921-pound Kasuga-style lantern, which arrived in five pieces in late 1965 and became the centerpiece of a garden that also featured a small wooden bridge and a collection of rocks.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years, it was maintained by our gardener with great pride,\u201d said former Dodgers owner Peter O\u2019Malley<\/a>, Walter\u2019s son. \u201cBut it was remote, and fans couldn\u2019t really get up there easily to see it or sit in the garden. And it got neglected for a few years. Some years later, I forget how many, we had to fence in the whole property.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2024, shortly after the Dodgers signed two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, the club moved the lantern to a place of prominence outside the top-deck gates, overlooking the downtown skyline. The move was an elaborate, delicate production. Bundled and boarded up, the lantern inched across the parking lot on the back of a flatbed truck that climbed a ring road steep enough to cause concern.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like they were moving the Ark of the Covenant,\u201d Perea said.<\/p>\n

No one exhaled until the cargo was unloaded, unswaddled, and confirmed to be in one piece.<\/p>\n

\"An <\/p>\n

An 8-foot-tall stone Kasuga-style lantern is displayed at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

(Christina House\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Perea\u2019s crew works out of a large metal shed at the far end of a parking lot, a shop they affectionately call \u201cthe Oasis.\u201d Much of what\u2019s inside was retrieved from a dumpster, or scavenged before it landed in one. Perea, who describes himself as a bargain shopper, is passionate about repurposing whatever he can; many of the succulents at the stadium came from his own clippings.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy general philosophy is I don\u2019t treat the Dodgers<\/a> like I\u2019m salaried management,\u201d he said. \u201cI treat them like I\u2019m a contractor that they don\u2019t want to get rid of. So I manage the expenses and the labor as such.\u201d<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t have much interaction with players and executives, though he\u2019s occasionally been called to their homes to help with landscaping problems. One visit stands out.<\/p>\n

\u201cVin Scully<\/a> is the coolest one I\u2019d stake a claim to,\u201d he said of the legendary play-by-play man. \u201cHe was an unbelievable class act. He had a tree issue. He had us out, and was so attentive and appreciative, it was just stunning to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

1 <\/p>\n

\"Landscape <\/p>\n

2 <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

3 <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

4 <\/p>\n

\"Adolfo <\/p>\n

1. Landscape manager Chaz Perea gives a tour of Dodger Stadium\u2019s botanic garden. (Christina House\/Los Angeles Times) 2. A ceramic dog and monkey sit on a golf cart inside the Dodger Stadium landscape team\u2019s shed on Tuesday. (Christina House\/Los Angeles Times) 3. A photo of Jim Lefebvre, Dodger player from 1965-1972, is surrounded by plants at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday. (Christina House\/Los Angeles Times) 4. Adolfo Hinojosa checks on the planters near center field at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday. (Christina House\/Los Angeles Times) <\/p>\n

On the hillside above the shop is an open-air lunch area, its seating made from wooden bleachers salvaged from the old right-field pavilion. Peek through the bushes and the stadium is visible in the distance. Inside the shop, the walls are lined with neatly organized shovels, pickaxes, and ladders. Above them hang paintings, art being another of Perea\u2019s passions, most of them made by his friends.<\/p>\n

Perea freely admits he\u2019s an odd fit for the job. He\u2019s not a baseball fan; he prefers beach volleyball and mixed martial arts. He had a rough upbringing in Arizona, dropped out of high school, and got by on $6.75 an hour doing golf-course maintenance, supplementing it with landscaping gigs he ran out of his pickup truck before eventually returning to school.<\/p>\n

He came back to the classroom with a purpose, not only finishing high school but going on to earn multiple advanced degrees and, ultimately, a Ph.D. He\u2019s now a professor of horticultural science and co-chair of agricultural science at Mt. San Antonio College.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s his day job that draws clusters of Dodger fans willing to pay $52.25 each for his 90-minute botanic garden tour of the grounds<\/a>. They explore \u201cAgave Island\u201d near the main entrance, a wedge of land planted with nine palm trees to match the number of players on a baseball field, and the planters outside the club-level entrance, where the crew grows chilies (jalape\u00f1os, serranos, habaneros), along with basil, mint, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. That garden spawned an annual salsa competition, in which club employees harvest their own ingredients from the planters, make salsa at home, and bring it back to be judged. Perea and his crew make handmade tortillas and quesadillas for the event.<\/p>\n

\"Landscape <\/p>\n

Landscape manager Chaz Perea gives a tour of Dodger Stadium\u2019s botanic gardens on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

(Christina House\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Two more planted islands are devoted entirely to tequila agave. It takes nearly a decade for the plant to mature, and about 110 pounds of its core to yield a single liter of tequila through processing. Perea and his crew hope to eventually try making some themselves, as an in-house project rather than a commercial one.<\/p>\n

The landscape looked very different before Perea arrived. He describes the old look as Disneyland-esque: heavy on lawns and flowers, constantly in need of replacement, and thirsty for water. About two years into the job, he began swapping annual flower beds for drought-tolerant succulents. When one executive noticed and ordered the flowers put back in a particular spot, Perea complied there, then made the same swap a little farther down the hillside, out of view.<\/p>\n

Turnover among executives and ownership gave him repeated openings to make wholesale changes, a shift that coincided with California\u2019s drought crisis. Within a few years, he had planted 10,000 cuttings and stripped every flower bed from the property.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people look at this as the last unpainted canvas in Los Angeles,\u201d Perea said.<\/p>\n

Chaz of Chavez Ravine, perpetually painting the corners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tens of thousands of people walk in and out of Dodger Stadium on any given night, paying scant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[185106,2139,27008,185105,2518,185107,101954,4194,185108,48,52,51,47,50,49,17428,136657,3730,185109,1166,72],"class_list":["post-470563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-concrete-planter","tag-dodger-stadium","tag-executive","tag-four-person-crew","tag-grand-opening","tag-hidden-garden","tag-hillside","tag-job","tag-kasuga-style-lantern","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-parking-lot","tag-perea","tag-plant","tag-popular-botanic-garden","tag-shop","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}