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Jack McDaniel has watched the flow of traffic near his hilltop Oro Valley home on North La Cañada Drive grow substantially in the past 24 years. Along with that growth, he's seen an increasing number of motorists mistakenly veer up his driveway, thinking it a side street. A gate was needed to block their way.

But McDaniel didn't want just any old gate. His would be a work of art.

"I enjoy something that's different, one of a kind. Especially at the entrance, I wanted something unique," he said.

So McDaniel, a native Tucsonan and a retired welding engineer, set out to create a driveway with a Sonoran Desert flair.

It's no accident that the natural desert scene depicted on his colorful metal gate is nearly a mirror image of the view beyond, where the same native plants dot a desert-landscaped yard.

McDaniel, 59, used the prickly pear cactus, night-blooming cereus, staghorn cholla, ocotillo and agave plants in his own yard as inspiration — and pattern-making material — for the gate. Even the rabbits and white-winged doves in the design are a tribute to the desert critters that frequent the nearly 2-acre property, McDaniel said.

McDaniel learned to weld from his father when he was 12 and worked as a welding engineer at Raytheon for 31 years. He said it took about a month of cutting, welding and painting to create the approximately 4-by-12-foot gate at the base of his driveway. He used rebar to create the ocotillo at the gate's center, attaching and painting concrete nails to look like flowers. He pieced segments of pipe together to make the cholla and hand-chiseled dimples in the back of metal prickly pear pads to give them the appearance of having thorns.

"I was trying to get it as lifelike as I could," said McDaniel, who said he traced pieces of cactus to create patterns and even took a prickly pear pad to the hardware store to try to match a paint color.

Several other pieces of McDaniel's ironwork are displayed throughout his home and yard, including a saguaro made from horseshoes, silhouettes of javelina, bobcat, coyote and deer, and a sculpture of a bull he made as a teenager. McDaniel said he spends a lot of time in his workshop, making items for his home and building hot rods.

His gate, however, remains one of his proudest artistic achievements, and he said he plans to build a second, smaller version for the path leading to his home's front door.