Author David Rains Wallace, in The Wilder Shore, a book about California’s landscapes, demonstrates the silliness and inaccuracy of certain clichés:

“‘Making the desert bloom’ is as great a misnomer as the ‘Bureau of Reclamation.’ The desert blooms without civilized help when ample rains bring out its considerable diversity and abundance of native wildflowers. It is not the desert that blooms in the cotton and melon fields of the Imperial Valley or the Gardens of Palm Springs. The desert no longer exists in such places; it has been replaced.”