Yes, this is a red russian rose, and it is not shot in visible light.
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 1600
JULIET
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name?
that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
Klaus,
Shakespeare considered a rose would be the same no matter what! For us too, the Rose is the sum
gestalt all the wonderful roses we've experienced: the red ones that lovers give, the ones on funeral caskets, the white one's in the jacket of a dandy, a garland, all and more make up our ideas of a rose.
Your rose is not anything Shakespeare would have considered. It's observed differently in a parallel universe. We could call it
Heaven Night Flower for it really seems to be part of a night sky.
Rachel,
This is no rose you have even sniffed!
This is the giant dark magenta state of being that insects inhabit.
We do not sniff as the insects do.
We do not have compound eyes as they do.
Each petal to them is a giant mass to explore.
What we do see is certainly divorced from the usual assumptions we have.
Even William Shakespeare would not recognize this as a rose but rather something from some herb garden of a witch from a cave in the bowels of the earth.
So what you are missing is
everything! That's the idea, I think of looking at things in new ways. It's this which allows us, from time to time to obtain insights otherwise closed to us.
Asher