The proverb April showers bring May flowers dates back to at least 1557, when a man by the name of Thomas Tusser wrote:
Sweet April showers
Do bring May flowers
I tip my hat to Army Chaplain (Lt. Col.) Milton Johnson for the information (see archived). While the proverb may not always hold true, it has a nice ring to it (if nothing else, the trees leaf in May). It is close enough to the mark for all normal purposes. In the spirit of our moving from April to May (after a weekend of heavy rain in New York City, I might add), I decided to share with you a flower photo from my collection of older photographs that I have not yet published. I present my photo of a rose at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden from April 26, 2007:
I took a good number of close-up flower photos at the Botanic Garden on April 26, 2007, but this rose came out the best of the bunch. I took the photo with my old Nikon D40 DLSR camera, which developed a focusing issue sometime shortly after I used it to take photos of Vinegar Hill’s Hudson Avenue and a watersprout in 2020. (The photo on our About Page is from the same set.)
(I made it my profile photo on Gmail when I made my account back in high school, and it is still the photo for that account, which continues to exist despite going mostly unused.)
This photo is so old that I originally uploaded it to Picasa before Google ate Picasa and eventually discontinued it in favor of Google Photos. At the time, I did not have a firm grasp of the principle that one ought to store data locally, so my only copies of the April 26, 2007 photos were on Google Photos. I eventually downloaded all of my photos before clearing my cloud storage account. While I no longer have the original full quality version of my rose, I used Upscayl, a free and open source image upscaler, to produce a higher resolution version of the photo before shrinking it for NLJ publication and using Nomacs to make some minor edits. You can view a higher resolution version of the image on my Pixelfed profile (see Pixelfed image; archived).
(See my more recent 2018 BlackBerry Classic rose photo from Brooklyn Heights.)
May 6, 2023 Update: Updated article to note that this photo was taken on April 26, 2007, not March 27 of the same year. I do have a set of photos from March 27, but this was part of the April collection.