plant

Tens of thousands of people walk in and out of Dodger Stadium 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.

“Getting to Dodger Stadium is not a small thing,” said Perea, 41, the stadium’s landscape manager. “You’ve got to park in this monster,” he said, motioning to the acres of asphalt around him, “and then go find your seat in that monster.”

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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’s botanic garden on Tuesday. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

For the past 17 years, Perea and his four-person crew have been responsible for every bit of stadium landscaping that isn’t the field itself. That’s roughly 300 acres, encompassing the parking lots, the hillsides meeting the 110 Freeway, and 149 concrete planters nicknamed “martinis” for their glass-like shape. The planters are original to the stadium’s 1962 construction, and many had crumbled badly enough over the decades to need painstaking repair.

The landscaping isn’t 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’Malley by Japanese sports columnist Sotaro Suzuki and his wife, Toku, who had attended the stadium’s 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.

“For years, it was maintained by our gardener with great pride,” said former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley, Walter’s son. “But it was remote, and fans couldn’t 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.”

In 2024, shortly after the Dodgers signed two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, 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.

“It was like they were moving the Ark of the Covenant,” Perea said.

No one exhaled until the cargo was unloaded, unswaddled, and confirmed to be in one piece.

An 8-foot-tall stone Kasuga-style lantern is displayed at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Perea’s crew works out of a large metal shed at the far end of a parking lot, a shop they affectionately call “the Oasis.” Much of what’s 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.

“My general philosophy is I don’t treat the Dodgers like I’m salaried management,” he said. “I treat them like I’m a contractor that they don’t want to get rid of. So I manage the expenses and the labor as such.”

He doesn’t have much interaction with players and executives, though he’s occasionally been called to their homes to help with landscaping problems. One visit stands out.

“Vin Scully is the coolest one I’d stake a claim to,” he said of the legendary play-by-play man. “He 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.”

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1. Landscape manager Chaz Perea gives a tour of Dodger Stadium’s botanic garden. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) 2. A ceramic dog and monkey sit on a golf cart inside the Dodger Stadium landscape team’s 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)

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’s passions, most of them made by his friends.

Perea freely admits he’s an odd fit for the job. He’s 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.

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’s now a professor of horticultural science and co-chair of agricultural science at Mt. San Antonio College.

But it’s 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. They explore “Agave Island” 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 (jalapeños, 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.

Landscape manager Chaz Perea gives a tour of Dodger Stadium’s botanic gardens on Tuesday.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

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.

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.

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

“A lot of people look at this as the last unpainted canvas in Los Angeles,” Perea said.

Chaz of Chavez Ravine, perpetually painting the corners.

The ruling says the Energy Department exceeded its authority by extending the plant’s operation.

A federal appeals court has ruled that the United States Energy Department exceeded its authority when it ordered a coal-fired power plant in the US state of Michigan to remain open beyond its planned retirement, dealing a setback to the Trump administration’s effort to keep ageing coal facilities operating.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously on Friday that there was no emergency under federal law that justified keeping the 64-year-old JH Campbell Generating Plant online. Energy Secretary Chris Wright invoked emergency powers last year, arguing that the plant was needed to maintain reliable electricity in the region.

President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency in an executive order in January last year, citing demand increases from artificial intelligence and data centre growth.

Judge Cornelia Pillard, writing for the three-judge panel, said the emergency provision of the Federal Power Act was intended as a “narrow, last-resort backstop.” She said the authority could be used only when immediate action was required, and states or utilities could not address the problem themselves.

Pillard also described the reversal of the plant’s “long and carefully planned retirement” as “disruptive”.

The plant, operated by Consumers Energy, had been scheduled to close in May 2025, but the company has continued operations under energy department orders. That has cost about $259m, according to financial filings, with opponents warning that the expense could ultimately fall on families and businesses in midwestern US states.

The company told The Associated Press it was reviewing the court ruling.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, whose office joined counterparts in Illinois and Minnesota in challenging the orders, welcomed the ruling. She said the appeals court had “thrown out DOE’s order that had zero basis in reality”.

The Energy Department defended its use of emergency powers, saying the orders helped prevent blackouts and “likely saved hundreds of lives” during periods of peak demand, particularly during severe winter storms in late January and early February.

The department said that during the winter storm peak, coal generation in affected areas increased by 25 percent compared to the previous year.

The Michigan case is one of several legal disputes that have emerged across the country. Secretary Wright issued another emergency order, just hours after the ruling, to a coal plant in Centralia, Washington, to remain in operation. Similar orders have been issued for plants in Indiana, Colorado and Florida, as well as an oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania.

The first F-15EX Eagle II destined for permanent assignment at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa departed Boeing’s St. Louis, Missouri, facility on August 28, 2026. The aircraft left St. Louis for the 142nd Wing at Portland Air National Guard Base, Oregon, where it will undergo final staging and integration preparations before its eventual deployment to the sprawling Okinawa installation it will call home. The Oregon unit is acting as a coordination and preperation unit for the 18th Wing, a function you can read more about in our interview with the wing’s commander.

This departure represents a critical, long-awaited milestone for the 18th Wing, which has been working toward the permanent stationing of the service’s most advanced Eagle variant to replace its now-withdrawn F-15C/D fleet. The arrival of the F-15EX in Japan, expected to begin in fiscal year 2027, which begins on October 1, 2026, will be a central pillar in the Air Force’s modernization of tactical airpower in the Indo-Pacific region.

“This is an important next step toward bringing the F-15EX home to Kadena,” said Brig. Gen. John Gallemore, 18th Wing commander, in an Air Force release. “Our team is ready to welcome the F-15EX, and this is another milestone that brings us closer to putting this capability in the hands of the airmen who will fly, maintain and employ it from Japan.”

The first F-15EX for Kadena’s 18th Wing, serial 22-0022, was noted flying test sorties from St. Louis in early August, initially in primer paint. By the middle of the month its was flying with its full livery, including the famous “ZZ” tail code.

The F-15EX is a significant jump in capability over the legacy Eagles. With modernized avionics, flight controls, an expanded electronic warfare suite, and increased weapons carriage — as well as potentially new and longer-reaching weapons — the jet is well-suited to operating in the vast Western Pacific. As Kadena prepares for the permanent arrival, the 18th Wing plans to integrate the EX with regional allies, including the Japan Air Self-Defense Force, building upon existing bilateral training exercises.

Two active-duty squadrons of F-15EXs are set to be established at Kadena, taking the place of units previously based there that had flown F-15Cs. The Air Force has been deploying F-15Es, F-22s and other fighters to the base on a rotational basis to fill the gap in the meantime.

The F-15EX will give U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific a high-capacity platform that complements the fifth-generation F-22 and F-35. With its ability to carry large air-to-air and air-to-surface payloads, the Eagle II can serve as a long-range “missile truck,” extending the reach and firepower of stealth aircraft operating closer to contested airspace. Its open-architecture systems also allow it to incorporate new sensors, weapons, and electronic warfare capabilities more readily than the aging F-15C/D fleet.

The aircraft’s value is also tied to its role in networked operations. Exercises such as Valiant Shield have demonstrated how the F-15EX can work with uncrewed aircraft like the  MQ-28 Ghost Bat, pointing toward mixed formations in which crewed fighters provide weapons, sensing, and command-and-control capacity for autonomous wingmen. Operating from strategic locations such as Kadena, the Eagle II could help the Air Force generate more combat power across the vast Pacific while reducing the burden on its limited number of stealth fighters.

Kadena will become the second Air Force location with combat-coded F-15EX aircraft, following the Oregon Air National Guard’s 142nd Wing.

The Air Force has previously announced plans to stand up National Guard F-15EX squadrons in California, Louisiana, and Michigan. Most recently, the Air Force announced plans to put F-15EX fighters at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina, to replace older F-15E Strike Eagle jets that will move to Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri.

While the movement of this first Kadena-bound F-15EX is a positive step, the wider Eagle II program is currently navigating some issues. According to a new Pentagon selected acquisition report released in August, the Air Force’s decision to aggressively expand its F-15EX fleet from 129 to 267 jets — intended to recapitalize the older F-15E force — has introduced substantial cost and schedule uncertainties that officials are now scrambling to manage.

The report warns that the extended acquisition strategy, which shifted from eight production lots to 12, will require Boeing to execute a “major technical refresh” to combat diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages. As systems like the radar, mission computer, and engines face potential obsolescence over the now-lengthened production timeline, the service faces what the report characterizes as a “significant redesign effort.” Program managers are planning to mitigate these risks by integrating upgrades through operational flight program releases scheduled between 2031 and 2035, a strategy they describe as a “structured, risk-reduced pathway” to avoid production line gaps.

Compounding these technical challenges are tangible production delays, largely stemming from a labor strike at the St. Louis plant from August to November 2025. The report notes that these are “unrecoverable delays,” forcing a cascading schedule slip. While Boeing was contracted to deliver all 12 jets from Lot 3 by early 2026, the company will only be able to field half of those by the end of the year. This has directly impacted the timeline for the Kadena deployment, which was originally envisioned for earlier in 2026, and has left the Air Force relying on “bridging strategies” and rotations to cover operational requirements until the Eagle IIs can fully stand up in Okinawa.

The Pentagon is now moving toward an aggressive production ramp-up, tasking Boeing to hit a rate of two jets per month. Keeping the F-15EX schedule on track will be a challenge, however, requiring successfully navigating ongoing parts shortages for critical systems, all while balancing the needs of foreign military sales customers who are also integrated into the supply chain.

For the 18th Wing, the arrival of the first F-15EX will bring a major advance in capabilities in a part of the world that needs them badly. At the same time, the program’s overall trajectory suggests that the wider transition to the new Eagle will come with some complex logistical and industrial challenges.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com