Seven nature photos, day 1: The Lurker in the Roses

A friend on Facebook has invited me to take part in an online exercise, to post seven nature photos in seven days. This is an easy enough challenge, but he further suggested that I do it using photos from posts on my blog.

I decided to take up this challenge, starting with my earliest posts and working my way forward. I was a little surprised to find that very few of the 172 posts from 2004, my first year of blogging, contained any nature photos. 2005 did a bit better, and I found myself with several candidate posts.

I selected this image:

It's a simple enough photo of a rose from the Royal Highness bush I had planted a few years earlier, back in the late summer of 2001. But it was taken on the day my father died, so there's a story that goes with it. And there's a surprise hidden in the image, something I had never seen before, and have never seen since. You can read all about it in my original post, The Lurker in the Roses, from August 30, 2005.