If the average annual rainfall in Raleigh, NC, is 46 inches (or there about), how can we call this a Desert Garden?
Of course, as Humpty Dumpty said in Through the Looking Glass, '”When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” So we call it a Desert Garden because we try to grow plants that don’t need much water.
We added six inches of shredded pine bark and three inches of PermaTill (which is the same thing that we did when we planted Gaillardia in the Garden of Weedin’. (Why “reinvent the wheel”?)

And our Desert Garden thrives.

Before.

First planting, 2010-09-08

Five years later 2016-09-25