I agree with @Diane_Miller about the composition and the saguaro/mesquite; that all fits together nicely.
For me this is a true challenge. The two dimensional image we bring home is stripped of so much of what we experienced, and to be able to keep that mood in the image is my quixotic quest. Sometimes it actually helps the image (see @Lon_Overacker’s recent Yosemite image and how the image stripped away the photographers’ convention going on around him), but in this image I’m not sure it is.
If I look at the image without your description of the time of day, my first thought is it has a strong (inappropriate) color cast. I think that’s magnified by the relative lack of dark areas. To feel like the early part of the day prior to sunrise, I would expect there to be a lot more darkness, and it might be worth playing with increasing contrast in the darks to see if that helps the eye interpret this as the blue hour.