“It has been said, and truly, that everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks or sticks,” wrote the author and environmentalist Edward Abbey, who spent much of his life exploring the high deserts of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. “You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.” Still — unsavory inhabitants notwithstanding — the arid, sandy swaths of the American Southwest have attracted generations of artists, mystics, hippies and cowboys. And now perfumers are following their lead, attempting to translate the desert’s resilient plants and otherworldly aura into fragrance.
For David Moltz,
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