Growing the future: Peter Olpe wants to make the South Coast Botanic Garden the standard for botanical gardens worldwide
Peter Olpe, President of the South Coast Botanic Garden Foundation Board of Trustees. Photo by David Fairchild
The South Coast Botanic Garden was founded in 1961, with a plan to reclaim nature out of a sanitary landfill that was once an open pit mine.
When Peter Olpe moved to the South Bay 24 years later, in 1985, he was a fresh-faced young computer hardware engineer from Cornell University with a job offer in hand from automotive and aeronautic giant TRW. Once there, he was tasked with creating something that no one knew how to do.
His job, alongside his team, was to design and build computers that could survive in the harsh environments of space while also being flexible enough to be used for any satellite or function. Much of what he worked on is still classified.
“I left school and was told that some things were impossible, and at TRW, I was immediately asked to make them possible,” Olpe said. “I learned that problems are challenges, and that solutions are there, you just may have to look at a problem a different way.”
With that in mind, it’s easy to take him seriously when, as President of the South Coast Botanic Garden Foundation Board of Trustees, he says the garden will become the gold standard for botanic gardens.
“Our goal is to have this facility be the best it possibly can be, a resource for millions of people — families, children, parents — in the Los Angeles community, something that our community can be proud to say is in their backyard,” Olpe said. “That’s the big picture.”
Olpe’s interest in gardening began small, with a backyard garden inspired by his wife Susan, and her interest in fuchsias. Those, he said, were his first real garden-grown plants. Before long, Olpe’s interest had grown to tomatoes and roses, two plants that he learned from personal experience are notoriously difficult to grow in his corner of the South Bay. One year, he planted 16 tomato plants, only to get a total of five tomatoes in return.
“Not five plants, just five tomatoes…time and time again with this plant, I was wasting my time,” he said. “Why was that? It was a problem, and as an engineer, I try to solve problems. Now I understand why that plant didn’t produce, and why that year the harvest was low. I got the answers, but that takes time.”
Microclimates. Roses and tomatoes like heat, and they like a lot of direct sunlight. In his area of South Redondo Beach, that’s not always a given.
“A lot of it comes down to proximity to the ocean, where air temperature is dominated by ocean temperature,” Olpe said. “When you have fog — say, June Gloom — it reduces the sunlight that plants get, and during a time when everywhere else in LA [plants have] explosive growth, we’re in fog. It’s a blessing and a curse.”
Through a combination of grafting and careful plant selection, Olpe’s tomato garden isn’t just flourishing, it’s producing heavily. A particularly productive 2015 growing season allowed him and his wife to have tomatoes each and every single day from January to June.
“I learned how to do it myself; taking the plants, growing the roots, and the tomato and grafting it so the top is the desired plant and the stock is a disease-resistant root stock,” Olpe said. “The yield is tremendous.”
Olpe’s mindset enables him to get in front of a task, tweak it and tune it, diving deeper and deeper until he’s felt he’s reached an end.
“I take what some people would do as ordinary and amp it up to something that only an engineer would do. It’s what I enjoy,” Olpe said. “I like it when someone tells me something can’t be done. No, there must be a way to do it.”
In 2010, when Olpe came onto the board of the South Coast Botanic
Bella Jacobson admires artist Sean Kenney’s Lego buffalo and calf at the South Coast Botanic Garden Lego exhibit last May. Photo (CivicCouch.com)
Garden Foundation after years of volunteering, he and the rest of the board members decided to and develop the property to the greatest extent possible.
“A lesson I took from TRW, was if you want to achieve the best results, hire the best people you can, and building a team is part of that effort,” Olpe said. “That’s what we’ve done.”
That year, the board hired Adrienne Nakashima, a woman with more than a decade in public and private management positions, as the Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer. It seemed a great fit for an organization managing a public garden jointly operated by the County of Los Angeles and the SCBGF.
“Normally when an executive starts somewhere, they ask what the plan is, what the goals are. At that time in 2010, there wasn’t anything current,” Nakashima said. “A Vision Plan hadn’t been done in 25 years, and we needed a new document that guided the garden.”
Three years later, with significant board, staff and community input, a revised Vision Plan was completed, giving the 55 year old garden a new path for its 87 acres of space.
“When I came in, it wasn’t a secret that the garden was a bit status quo for a while; everyone was content with the way things were going,” Nakashima said. “But the board wanted the garden to have a more prominent role in the community, to be more visible and to attract more visitors…we saw a need from families who were yearning for a place to provide access to open space and nature.”
Families, Olpe says, are what have changed his mind on what the big picture is for the Garden.
“When you step out of a meeting here and walk through the garden, just participating as a visitor and talking to people, you learn that everybody has a different reason for being here,” Olpe said. “The garden is about relationships, learning and generating memories you’ll have your whole life.”
But to get to that point, he and his colleagues needed to focus on the facility itself, from programming to classes to events. An expansion of the Rose Garden, Olpe said, will be complete by mid-2017. Expansions of the Children’s Garden, Japanese Garden and Native Plant Garden are underway.
“Everyone from myself to every board member to every staff member is excited about what’s happening here,” Olpe said. “And for the first time, perhaps in the history of the garden, we’re engaging the community to participate.”
The programming is becoming more varied as well. Earlier this year, Nature Connects, a touring Lego art exhibit, was installed in the garden from February to May. A Pokemon Go Day was held during the height of the mobile app’s popularity.
“Over 1,000 people showed up, and it was more than just kids, but it was kids showing their parents and grandparents how to play,” Olpe said. “I was quite honestly surprised, even stunned, at what that turned into.”
It’s a credit, he says, to the staff, which finds ways to achieve the garden’s mission while also giving the community what it wants.
“It’s a challenge — don’t forget, we’re a botanical garden,” Olpe said. “Almost all of our plants have been labeled. If you read one label a minute, it’d take over a week to see everything.”
Membership has tripled in recent years, growing to over 9,000 individuals.
“It’s exciting, I can’t wait until the Rose Garden is finished, and the Children’s Garden,” Olpe said. “This is a facility, a garden, that is an amazing community asset, and I’m excited to be a part of it…I think the board is setting the stage for the next 100 years.”
Olpe is hesitant to talk about ideas that aren’t strictly in the Garden’s Vision Plan.
“With unlimited funding, we could do unlimited projects — a visitors center with a cafe, an auditorium, an administrative facility, but there are design issues and cost issues,” he said.
There’s one nagging idea that springs forth when he’s asked what he would do if he could snap his fingers and make a project happen.
About two years ago, Olpe stopped at the exit of the South Coast Botanic Garden and stared at the property across Crenshaw Boulevard. It’s also landfill, part of the same mine that once sat far below where the Garden currently lies.
“I thought to myself, who better to develop, manage and maintain the remaining landfill than those who have 55 years of experience across the street?” Olpe said. “There may be a million reasons why this is a bad idea, perhaps impossible, but I couldn’t help but think about the amazing potential.”
When Olpe mentioned the idea to a fellow board member, the board member was taken aback.
“That’s either brilliant, or sheer madness,” Olpe recalled his colleague saying. “And I thought to myself, it wouldn’t be fun if it weren’t a little of both, would it?