Sonoran Desert
— — a desert that flowers on its own schedule.
Not only on a wall.
“The Sonoran is the warmest of North America's deserts and the only one where the saguaro grows. It stretches from the Sea of Cortez east into the Sierra Madre Occidental, across pale basalt and rust-coloured pumice. After the summer monsoons the desert floor turns yellow with brittlebush. The Pinacate volcanic field, on the Mexican side, is one of the strangest landscapes on the continent — black craters, white dunes, a silence held by basalt.
Sonoran Desert, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Sonoran Desert covers roughly 260,000 square kilometres across northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States — most of Sonora, the eastern half of the Baja California peninsula, and parts of Arizona and California. It is bounded on the west by the Sea of Cortez and on the east by the Sierra Madre Occidental. The saguaro cactus, Carnegiea gigantea, grows nowhere else in the world. The desert's bimodal rainfall pattern, with both summer and winter rains, supports a higher diversity of plant and animal life than any other North American desert.
On the Mexican side, the El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve protects 7,150 square kilometres of volcanic and dune landscape and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013. The dormant Pinacate shield volcano rises to 1,206 metres above a field of black lava flows pierced by ten enormous maar craters, some over a kilometre across. To the west the Gran Desierto de Altar holds the largest active erg dune field in North America. There are no settlements inside the reserve and almost no sound.
Rain arrives twice. Winter storms drift down from the Pacific between December and February, soaking the soil before the long dry spring. Then in July the summer monsoon climbs north from the Gulf, breaking against the Sierra Madre in violent late-afternoon storms that can drop several centimetres of rain in an hour. The wildflower bloom that follows the winter rains, usually in March, turns whole valleys yellow with brittlebush and Mexican gold poppy. The saguaros flower in May and the ocotillo turns red after almost any rain.