Suddenly people realized, 'Hey, this great vegetable grows right in my own backyard.' " The Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix grows a variety of prickly pear cactus -- some so tightly covered in wispy bristles that they look like hairbrushes, others with long and evenly spaced spikes.
Hundreds of thousands of golf balls are lost or abandoned every day in lakes, ponds, forests, wetlands, deserts, backyards, gardens, parking lots, cemeteries, on rooftops and at the bottom of woodchuck holes.
ONE recent afternoon, Jeff Smedstad walked into his backyard at the edge of the desert here to gather some greens for dinner.
It is that cellular connection to the earth that he seeks back in his own backyard garden and in the surrounding desert.
PHOENIX -- There used to be two kinds of homeowners in this scorching city, those with dazzling green lawns irrigated by sprinklers and those with more natural backyard expanses of rocks, cactuses and desert flora, which required no watering at all.
And then there's the rest of our backyard which transitions from high mountain desert to deep canyon rivers to pristine alpine lakes.
Pretend that your backyard is a field or a green desert.
The children had been playing Sunday in the backyard of their grandmother's home in this desert town east of Los Angeles when the girls tried to push the boy's head into a mud puddle.
Like everything in LA, it started out in a backyard garage and ended in embers on the mojave desert sands.
A sophisticated network of illicit exchange operates seamlessly between the people on either side, for whom the desert is a mere extension of their backyard.
