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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.

Social media star Amelia Dimoldenberg is making way for a new chapter, ending her beloved celebrity interview series “Chicken Shop Date” after more than a decade.

The British personality, who has disarmed A-list celebrities with her deadpan delivery and brought her distinct interview style to the Oscars red carpet, announced on Thursday that the final episodes of “Chicken Shop Date” are imminent and that new work is on the horizon. “I never thought I’d stop Chicken Shop Date, I thought maybe it would be a part of me forever, and in some way it always will,” Dimoldenberg, 32, said in her Instagram announcement, “but I feel like it’s now time to move on from this adventure and onto a new one.”

Dimoldenberg began “Chicken Shop Date” as a teenager. It first manifested as a column in a youth publication before the host eventually took it to YouTube in 2014. In the years since moving to the online platform, Dimoldenberg became a viral sensation, sitting down for chats and chicken with stars including Cher, Keke Palmer, Charli XCX, Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Garfield. She has published and produced, via her production company Dimz Inc., more than 100 episodes, with the series’ final installments on the way.

In her Instagram caption, the host reflected on her celebrity subjects over the years.

“I’ve spent my entire twenties sitting across from the most incredible people, people I’d always dreamt of meeting,” she wrote. “All of them charmed me (some more than others) and I definitely charmed them.”

She also wrote that “Chicken Shop Date” has been her “very own romcom” and also reflected on the show’s journey which has made her a staple on the awards circuit. She returned to the Oscars earlier this year to oversee its red carpet coverage.

“The beauty of my interviews is that they look so off the cuff,” she told The Times ahead of the ceremony earlier this year. “I think that’s what people like about me: I’m not going to be doing an in-depth look at their career or ask a very sincere question, but I will have done all my research so that I can ask them something that’s related to their movie or themes of their work or their interests that maybe catches them off guard. I don’t have to take the style of other reporters; I can do it in my own way.”

In the comments section, fellow social media stars and interviewers “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans and Ziwe celebrated Dimoldenberg. “Legendary run Amelia, I’ll be first in line for whatever’s next,” Evans wrote. Dimoldenberg and Evans appeared on each other’s shows in a crossover event in 2023.

A guest on The Repair Shop: Beyond The Barn opened up about the tragic death of their son.

A guest on The Repair Shop has opened up about their heartbreak after the tragic death of their son. The BBC programme returned to screens on Wednesday, September 2, with the first episode of Beyond the Barn.

The series follows experts restoring precious items from guests across the country, while also discovering what happened after the special items were restored.

The items included in tonight’s episode were a replica of Doctor Who’s robot dog K-9, a cowboy hat worn by musician John Cambridge, who played alongside David Bowie, and a leather case used by a cook who catered for Winston Churchill during World War II.

Luthier Julyan Wallis, who repairs instruments and guitars, also set to work on restoring a ukulele, after the owner’s parents brought it in following his tragic death in a motorcycle accident.

Couple Colin and Trish were looking for Julyan’s expertise to return the music to their precious instrument. Showing the broken ukulele, with its strings torn out of place, Trish explained: “This is our son’s ukulele. He was killed in November 2022 in a motorcycle accident.”

“Awful, I’m really sorry to hear that,” host Will Kirk replied. Trish went on: “Cameron had lots of musical instruments, he loved music.” Colin continued: “He grew up in a very musical house, his brother played guitar and Cameron wanted to play guitar too.”

They shared how their son played guitar, bass guitar, double bass, banjo and accordion. “He was a teacher in Thailand,” Trish went on. “When he went off to Thailand he took the ukulele and a chess set, and nothing else.”

Paying tribute, Colin called Cameron “outstanding”, as Trish shared: “He loved people, he was a caring person. He hated to see anybody sad, down, music was part of the way he tried to make people happy.”

Will replied: “This must have meant quite something to him.” Trish and Colin wanted to restore Cameron’s most-prized possession so that she could one day play it herself.

Cameron’s ukulele had been broken after a friend sat on it, with Colin sharing: “We heard a crunch. But Cameron, being the type of person he was, he didn’t want the friend to be upset so he threw it over his shoulder and denied that it was there. It landed in some bushes near the house, I think he knew it was beyond repair so he left it there. And I think it rested there for about six months.”

When Trish and Colin travelled to Thailand to bring Cameron’s body home, they couldn’t find the ukulele at first. “There were lots of tears,” they recalled. Trish explained how they found the ukulele when her sunglasses “flew off”, with Colin saying: “It was almost as if Cameron was saying, don’t forget my ukulele.”

Trish broke down in tears as she reflected on the moment she saw the broken instrument. She said: “For me it was, Cameron’s gone and that’s gone too, because it’s smashed.” She added: “Cameron touched this, he touched the strings, he held it close to him, almost hugging it. I’ll be able to do the same, it will feel like I’ve got a little bit of Cameron back.”

The Repair Shop: Beyond the Barn is available to watch in BBC iPlayer.

The Repair Shop’s expert craftsman Dominic Chinea has launched into yet another ambitious engineering project – leading to a somewhat chaotic video from his workshop

“The pressure really is on,” says The Repair Shop’s Dominic Chinea as he embarks on a tough engineering project: “We’re going to blitz this Land Rover and get it hopefully running, starting, possibly driving.”

In a new video, Dominic adds that, as he’s still missing a few components, it probably won’t be fully running for a little while yet. Nevertheless, he says, he’s determined to move as fast as he can with the project: “I do feel like this video needs to come with a little bit of a disclaimer or a warning that it’s quite hectic,” he joked, while giving his YouTube viewers an update.

Explaining that he has overstretched himself a little, Dominic says: “I’ve got multiple jobs all over the place and I am jumping around with no time. I filmed as much as possible and I’ve tried to assemble it into some kind of video to make some kind of sense.”

He stresses that the heat is on: “I have two days to get as much done as I possibly can.” But nevertheless, Dominic adds, he knows that rushing a job can lead to disaster.

“Patience is so important at moments like this.” He says, “I’m so tempted to just reach for the biggest hammer and try and persuade these things off of the shaft. But that is how you damage things.”

Dominic doesn’t need anything in his workshop to suffer any more damage. When Dominic and his wife Maria packed up their house in Kent last year and moved to Cornwall with their dog Wendy, he admitted that weatherproofing the newly converted workshop would be a “pressure.”

The dramatic storms that thrashed the county in January made Dominic’s prediction all too real. He was left struggling to make urgent repairs before he could get back to work, all while attempting to complete the renovations for his farmhouse kitchen.

He said at the time: “The storm has caused a lot of damage, the workshop roof, various tiles and bits and bobs. I’m doing my best to deal with those, I’ve ordered more roof sheets and I’ve lined up roofers to try and fix the roof, but I’m also juggling trying to finish this kitchen.”

A month later, another violent storm caused a section of his workshop roof to collapse, inflicting substantial damage to a nearly irreplaceable vehicle he’d been restoring underneath.

Then, in June, Dominic’s workshop was hit by yet another apocalyptic storm. Somehow, amid all this chaos he’s managed to fit in the filming of two TV series.

His decision to put his life on screen with his new series Dom Chinea’s Cornish Workshop was by no means an easy one. “It was definitely different to filming The Repair Shop, but that was part of the reason to try to do it, to experience something new.”

And of course he’s still working alongside the rest of The Repair Shop team. In tonight’s season opener for Beyond the Barn, electronics expert Mark Stuckey restores a homemade K-9 dog, and leather expert Suzie Fletcher repairs a bag belonging to Winston Churchill’s cook.

Meanwhile, milliner Jayesh Vaghela undertakes the delicate restoration, determined to bring this unique piece of rock ‘n’ roll history back to life while preserving its authentic character and remarkable connection to the rise of David Bowie and the 1970s glam rock movement.

The government hopes the plug-in panels will offer people a more affordable way into solar energy compared to roof installation, although savings will be lower because they generate less power.

A one-panel kit will cost £699 while two-panels will be £1,089, according to UK solar company UKSOL.

The current regulations only allow people to plug in one device per property, but this may be changed in future. A single device may include more than one panel.

The government expects prices to settle at £400-£600 as competition increases and more products are developed.

Its research shows a household could save between £70 and £110 a year on their energy bills.

The precise amount will depend on how the panels are orientated and how long they run. An unshaded south-facing spot is best.

Households which use energy during daylight hours will benefit most as the electricity must be used as it is generated.

Any power not consumed will flow back to the grid, but it’s unlikely homes will get any cash for this.

Unlike rooftop solar panels, these systems do not need to be certified under the official Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS), which is the UK’s official quality mark for small-scale renewable energy systems.

But it also means they will not normally qualify for the Smart Export Guarantee that pays people for excess solar power.