User Tools
Sidebar
start
Table of Contents
SABG main page
To change from a dark background to a light background or vice versa, click on “Toggle theme” (above).
Noticeboard
- The timetable for the November Seed and Bulb Exchange 2024 has been announced.
- The old
sabg.tkdomain will expire on 6 January 2025, after which it will not give access to our web-site. We have been usingsabg.uksince 2022. Please make sure you change any old bookmarks (“favourites”) tosabg.ukas soon as possible. - The Summer 2024 Bulb & Seed Exchange has now finished and Jon Evans has posted the bulbs and seeds to members who requested them.
- Bert Zaalberg reports that the bulbs listed as Gethyllis gerardii are almost certainly Gethyllis gregoriana. See the News section for more details.
- The SABG Autumn meeting will be on Sunday 20th October 2024 at Badger’s Farm Community Centre (a change to the originally published provisional date). Alex Summers will give a talk on “The Richtersveld – collecting in an arid biodiversity hotspot”. More details below.
- Newsletter no. 51 (July 2024) is available.
- Bulletin no. 51/2 (30 September 2024) has been emailed (and posted to UK members who don’t use email).
![//Lachenalia aloides// var. //aurea// [If you can't see the picture, perhaps your browser settings need changing.]](/_detail/pict5136-680x1100.png?id=start "//Lachenalia aloides// var. //aurea// [If you can't see the picture, perhaps your browser settings need changing.]")
Dates
- SABG members are invited to join the NAAS visit to the Nerine collection in the Five Arrows Gallery and the glasshouses at Exbury Gardens, SO45 1AZ on Saturday 19th October 2024 at 10.30am for tea and biscuits and 11:00am for the Gallery opening. Further details at http://www.nerineandamaryllidsociety.co.uk/forthcoming-events
- The SABG Autumn 2024 meeting is on Sunday 20th October 2024
- The SABG Spring meeting has not yet been booked for 2025
News
- The timetable for the November Seed and Bulb Exchange 2024 has been announced. Details have been emailed to members in Bulletin 51/2, and can also be found on our Bulb & Seed Exchanges page. [Jon Evans, 10 September 2024]
- Correction to the list of bulbs and seeds for the main 2024 Exchange: Bert Zaalberg reports that the bulbs listed as Gethyllis gerardii are almost certainly Gethyllis gregoriana. He wrote that “Since gerardii is an unpublished species name, I tried to get more info through Paul Cumbleton to find out its proper name. Paul told me that he purchased them in 2006/2007 as G. gerardii from Gordon Summerfield. Location info was Nardouwsberg, Clanwilliam. After having seen pictures of flowers and leaves, I’m pretty certain this is Gethyllis gregoriana. Leaves are quite diagnostic for this species and match the description Paul gave me. I assume it was a simple typo from Gordon back then, since gregoriana was cultivated by Gordon Summerfield in those days.” (Thanks, Bert!) [21 August 2024]
- The list of bulbs and seeds in the 2024 Bulb & Seed Exchange is available: members’ requests to reach Jon Evans by 30th August. [16 August 2024]
- Very occasionally I change the “theme” (style) of the web site. The current theme has a choice of a light or dark background. To change from one to the other, click on “Toggle theme” at the very top on the right-hand side. For more information, see About the SABG web site [20 June 2024]
Recent emails
The following emails were sent recently to all SABG members whose email addresses we have. (The dates are when the emails were sent, not the dates of any meetings or deadlines to which they might refer.) If you are a member and didn’t receive any of them, please email Richard White (see “Contacts” on this page). (If you’re not a member and are interested in what we do, see our pages About the SABG and How to join the SABG.)
- SABG Bulletin 51/2 (30 September 2024)
- SABG Bulletin 51/1 (16 August 2024)
- SABG Newsletter 51 (31 July 2024)
- SABG Bulletin 50/3 (17 July 2024)
- SABG Bulletin 50/2 (19 June 2024)
- SABG Bulletin 50/1 (15 March 2024)
Remember that reasons for not receiving our emails include the following:
- You haven’t notified us of a change of email address (tell me now!)
- Your inbox is full or your total email quota has been exceeded (download and delete old emails!)
- Your email provider classifies some of our emails as “spam” (look in your “Spam” or “Junk” folder and mark our emails as “not spam”!)
- Our software encountered an error when sending
- We’ve made a mistake (these things happen!)
We made changes (on 13 April 2022) intended to reduce the likelihood of our emails being regarded as spam. Please let me know (with a copy of the email) if anything from the SABG (with the SABG’s Lachenalia logo, rather than from an individual member) ends up in your Spam or Junk email folder. Thank you.
Autumn 2024 meeting
Our next meeting will be on Sunday 20th October 2024.
The speaker for this meeting is Alex Summers. who will give a talk on “The Richtersveld – collecting in an arid biodiversity hotspot”. Alex was until recently the curator of the National Botanic Garden of Wales, now working in a National Trust garden. The NBGW has a large section devoted to plants from regions with a Mediterranean climate, including a collection of South African bulbs.
After the lunch-break we expect to have some short talks on either Massonia by Paul Cumbleton or Eucomis by Tom Radford, or both if there is time.
Directions to the meeting hall. The doors will open at 10.00, and the meeting will close at about 14.30. SABG members, their guests and visitors are welcome. Admission is £3.00 and parking is free.
More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.
Other meetings
- Saturday in October 2024: Nerine visit day
- both organised by the Nerine and Amaryllid Society at the Five Arrows Gallery, Exbury Gardens, Exbury, Southampton SO45 1AX, by kind invitation of Nicholas de Rothschild and Theo Herselman. These events are for NAAS members, but SABG members are also invited; see the NAAS events page, and please inform Theo or the NAAS Secretary Alison Corley alison.corley@btinternet.com if you wish to attend so that numbers can be estimated.
Latest newsletters and bulletins
- The latest newsletter is number 51 (July 2024). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.
- The latest bulletin is number 51/2 and was emailed to members on 30 September 2024.
Further information
- Help on cultivation, using the web site, etc.
- More information about our meetings, the location and directions are shown on our About our meetings.
- More information about the Group
- We have a Google Calendar, so you can add our events to your phone or other device.
- A list of our Past, present and future meetings
- Links to other web sites including suppliers of bulbs and seeds
- We have started a Digital library
Photo gallery
I plan to include a photo gallery here. Until it is ready, why not visit Audrey Cain's BulbWeb? Her web-site, now hosted by the SABG, contains over 1,400 photographs of plants in 175 genera (not all of them are South African).
About the Group
The SABG is based in the UK and is for anyone interested in growing the beautiful and diverse bulbous plants of South Africa and neighbouring countries. You do not need to be an expert (I’m not!) or live in the UK, but our meetings have all been in England so far.
The objective of the Southern African Bulb Group is to further the understanding of the cultivation of Southern African bulbs, where ‘bulbs’ is used in the broad sense to encompass bulb-, corm- and tuber- possessing Southern African plants, which are mostly ‘monocots’ (plants with strap-like leaves and flower parts in threes or sixes) but also including ‘dicots’ (with broad leaves and frequently five-petalled flowers) such as Oxalis.
Our activities include two meetings per year with talks and plant sales (recently these have been in Winchester in southern England), one or two Bulb & Seed Exchanges per year, and three or four Newsletters per year.
Many of these plants come from the former Cape Province of South Africa, now the Northern, Western and Eastern Cape Provinces, and are easy to grow in a cool greenhouse or a sunny conservatory or window sill. They usually provide colourful flowers in autumn and winter and need a dry period in summer, because they are mostly winter growers from the winter rainfall areas of South Africa. Some are summer growers and a few of these will grow outside in southern or sheltered parts of the UK, such as Agapanthus, some Nerines and Tulbaghias, etc. Others, like Lachenalia, are real jewels to brighten up your conservatory when not much else is in flower.
For help with finding your way around, click on Help (on the sidebar, which may appear on the left of the page on computers and at the top on small devices).
Contacts
- To join the group, or to enquire about joining, email Rodney Sims rodney.sims@tiscali.co.uk. See How to join the SABG.
- For enquiries about the Bulb & Seed Exchanges, email Jon Evans jon@sabg.uk. See Bulb & Seed Exchanges.
- To enquire about the newsletter or web site, to send suggestions for additions and improvements, or to submit items for inclusion, email Richard White richard@sabg.uk.
Discussion
The following pages have discussion entries:
| Bulb topics | 11:23 14/04/2024 | Richard White | 0 Comments |
| Hardiness of South African bulbs | 15:12 10/04/2023 | Richard White | 1 Comment |
| How to grow South African bulbs | 15:41 30/03/2023 | Richard White | 1 Comment |
[Copyright © 2024 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]
start.txt · Last modified: 23:18 06/10/2024 by Richard White
Page Tools
Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license: CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International
