Phoenix
— the desert that learned to keep a city.
Not only on a wall.
“Arizona's capital, set in the Salt River Valley of the Sonoran Desert. Saguaro cacti hold the foothills; the city fills the basin between four ranges. The summer monsoon arrives in early July, walls of brown dust before the rain. Camelback Mountain rises out of the centre. The Desert Botanical Garden keeps four trails of Sonoran plants in eye-level light, best walked before nine in the morning.
Phoenix, 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.
Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, sits in the Salt River Valley of the Sonoran Desert at an elevation of about 330 metres (1,086 feet). The city proper holds roughly 1.6 million residents, the fifth-largest in the United States, and the metropolitan area passes 5 million. The city was founded in 1867 on the remnants of Hohokam canal works that pre-dated it by more than a thousand years, and took its name from the legend of rising from those ruins. Today the Salt River Project still routes much of the original Hohokam alignment.
Phoenix runs the highest annual mean temperature of any large American city, with summer highs regularly above 43 Celsius (110 Fahrenheit) from June through August. The North American Monsoon arrives in early July and lasts through mid-September, bringing roughly half the year's rainfall in two months. Dust walls (haboobs) sometimes precede the storms by an hour, rolling in from the south at up to a hundred kilometres per hour. The dry winters, December through March, draw the largest visitor seasons and the spring training crowds.
The Desert Botanical Garden, on 140 acres in Papago Park, holds about 50,000 plants across four marked trails and over half the world's recorded saguaro varieties. Camelback Mountain rises 825 metres above the city centre and offers two summit routes, Echo Canyon and Cholla, both rated difficult and best hiked before nine in the morning during summer. The Heard Museum, on Central Avenue, holds one of the most significant collections of American Indian art in the country, with eleven galleries and an outdoor sculpture courtyard.