If you look at the shirt as a whole the cacti landscape is not important as such, it's barely noticeable. But the cacti landscape is part of what makes the Peyote shirt brilliant, by far the best shirt out of all these retros. This shirt is the only one that manages to break out of the conventional (and predictably boring) and create art, it even achieves the metaphysical!
Without the cacti landscape the shirt would have too much purple and the Coyote head would be lessened. Now the Coyote appears as a spirit totem on the night sky above the desert on a background of Imperial Purple (the color of the Roman Emperors). The cacti landscape's golden sand tones balances nicely against the purple and helps frame and put the focus on the coyote. They could have gone with some boring sand colored sleeves and rims without the landscape, but the shirt would have been lessened and lost the story and overall impact. Now the Coyote, the main symbol, is iconic and totem like.
This shirt is an instant design classic!