You're right, Palm Springs is a lush garden of eden.
A picture paints a thousand words. All the stuff from red to orange would be desert. I'll let the readers of this post decide if there's a lot of desert in Cali. Every year I was stationed at Camp Pendleton in Northern San Diego/Orange county we had Marines out there building firebreaks to prevent the whole base from going up in flames. We didn't do it because Southern California resembles Greece....