THE parched desert of Death Valley, California, normally the hottest and driest place in North America, has been painted with colour by wild flowers brought into bloom by the wettest year in a century.

Vast fields of desert gold poppy, Eschscholzia glyptosperma, desert star, Monoptilon bellioides, evening primrose and phacelia have sprouted in the usually barren moonscape, which includes the lowest point in the Western hemisphere, at 282ft below sea level.

Visitors to the national park, where summer temperatures reach 54C (130F) in the shade, can now go windsurfing at Badwater, a small salty pond that has become a lake five miles wide. Kayakers have been paddling in the shallow water that has collected at the valley’s lowest point. With so much life in evidence, some are even questioning whether Death Valley still deserves its name.

More than 6in (15cm) of rain has fallen in the valley since last summer, three times the normal level, as California experiences one of its wettest winters on record.

The heavy rains have caused deadly mudslides and flooding. Last August, flash floods washed away part of Highway 90, one of the main roads into the valley, killing two people and closing the park for ten days. Yet the rainfall has set the desert ablaze. Rainwater has dissolved the protective coating off millions of seeds that have been dormant for years, giving life to more than 50 varieties of wild flowers with names such as gravel ghost and desert five-spot.

“This type of consistent rain is a recipe for an explosion of colour,” said a spokesman for the Theodore Payne Foundation, a local wild flower group, which runs a telephone hotline on the latest bloomings. “2005 is a year likely to be remembered as the wild-flower show of a lifetime.”

The display is attracting crowds of tourists, including Laura Bush, the First Lady, who took a holiday in the park last week and dragged her Secret Service agents on a ten-mile hike.

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