#sparkchamber 041822 — Chaz Perea
Last week marked the home opener for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and #sparkchamber is on the scene, spotlighting the country’s first sports arena with an accredited botanic garden — a testament to the vision and will of the stadium’s Landscape Manager, Chaz Perea. Excerpted from an article published in the Los Angeles Times in early March by staff writer Jeanette Marantos, you have to know that Chaz Perea doesn’t do anything halfway. He’s a beast about exercise, for instance, but he doesn’t just run or ride a bike; he trains for extreme sports like jumping into frigid water and swimming miles in the dark. When he had to quit a race one year because of hypothermia, he began taking icy showers to make him less susceptible to the cold.
And when it came to school, Perea didn’t just go to college: He earned three horticultural science degrees plus an arborist certification and an MBA in management while working two jobs — which he still does — as the Dodger Stadium landscape manager and a horticulture professor.
So when Perea was inspired to transform the stadium’s water-hungry landscape of ivy and vines and tender annual flowers to a palette of drought-tolerant plants heavy on California native varieties, he didn’t just decide to plant a few poppies and salvias.
“He just called me out of the blue asking for help,” said Abby Meyer, executive director of the U.S. office of Botanic Gardens Conservation International, which is based at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. “When I told him about accreditation, he almost peed his pants,” she said. “He was like, ‘OK! We’re doing this!’ His excitement was contagious and very inspiring.”
But the project was daunting. “Botanic gardens are living museums where we maintain plant genetic resources and heritage,” said Meyer. “To qualify [as a botanic garden], you need to have a permanent living collection and a commitment to growing those plants and maintaining a level of plant diversity long-term.” Creating the botanic garden isn’t just about landscaping, Perea said. It’s also about respect — for the history of the land, the people who once lived there and the people who work and play there now.
Perea convinced stadium management and his skeptical crew that this idea made sense, brought in a panel of advisors, and spent five years satisfying the accreditation requirements — which were finalized in December.
Today, the slopes and giant concrete martini-shaped planters around the stadium have been transformed into beds of fragrant salvias, agaves of multiple colors and size, and boulder-sized century plants sending their towering blooms into the sky. The boxes outside the Dodgers Team Store at the Top Deck are overflowing with succulents of every color. And true to a botanic garden, all the plants have their tags listing their common and botanical names.
Public access and education are part of the requirement for botanic gardens, but for Perea it’s also about building awareness of water-wise landscaping and irrigation, especially for the Latino community, which isn’t always targeted for these kinds of programs. He also hopes that getting Dodger fans excited about the plants around the stadium will spark more visits to the region’s other botanic gardens.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
He’d just turned 31. He’d been working at Dodger Stadium for seven years while finishing his advanced degrees and had hundreds of hours of unused vacation, so when a friend invited him to join his trip to France, Perea decided to go.
And that’s how he got his mind blown at Versailles.
“The place was drop-dead gorgeous,” he said. “But then I looked around and saw these guys who were working there and I started thinking ... ‘This is all just plants and concrete. ... Why can’t Dodger Stadium do this too?’”
He went back to Europe three more times over the next four years, visiting Spain, Italy and Greece, and each trip just deepened his admiration for the way Europeans have integrated art and plants throughout their cities. “These people have been here 2,000 years figuring things out and they have an appreciation for beauty we don’t have,” he said. “We do a terrible job with that in Los Angeles. I started thinking about why it’s so much better over there, and here’s a key factor: Investments in beauty pay off in the long term because people make pilgrimages to see them. I thought, ‘We can do that at Dodger Stadium. If we do it in-house, and it’s built by my team, it will be beautiful and people will come.’”
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
Perea’s vision was to create a water-wise landscape that will introduce thousands of stadium visitors to the beauty of California native and other drought-resistant plants and water-saving irrigation techniques. “In general, if you’re a plant and you can take the heat and adapt well to our soil, we want you.”
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
Experimentation is part of the process. “We just see what works.” There’s something exciting about putting all those agaves so close together. Maybe, Perea said, only half-joking, the wind will cross-pollinate these different varieties, and create a new agave hybrid that his crew could propagate and sell someday in the stadium gift store. Dodger Blue Agave, anyone?
4.] How do you know when you are done?
Perea designed special Aztec eagle patches that are sewn onto all the orange safety vests worn by him and his staff. “People try to buy those vests off their backs,” he said, “but they’re only for my crew.”
Their lush hillside retreat also is reserved just for landscaping business and meetings. It wasn’t always comfortable for his crew to go to the stadium’s main office for lunches or meetings, because, “if it’s a common space, people who are suited up don’t always like to sit next to someone in an orange vest,” he said. “But this is theirs; it’s something they can be proud of.”
And it was a way to build unity, just like the outrageous idea of building a botanic garden at a sports stadium, Perea said. “We needed a dream to chase together.”
