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//Lachenalia aloides// var. //aurea// [If you can't see the picture, perhaps your browser settings need changing.]

SABG

Noticeboard

  • The SABG Autumn 2023 meeting will be on Sunday 22nd October 2023, at Badger’s Farm Community Centre, Winchester. See below.
  • Newsletter no. 49 (August 2023) is available.
  • The 2023 Bulb & Seed Exchange has closed. Here is the list of bulbs and seeds that were available. There may be another Exchange later this year.
  • Bulletin no. 48/3 (23 June 2023) has been emailed.
  • As an experiment, I have added a couple of Discussion sections to the Cultivation and Hardiness pages. Please feel free to try them out (there are direct links to them at the bottom of this page).

Dates

News

  • More options to order seeds and bulbs from South African and other suppliers are described in Bulletin 48/3 emailed to SABG members. [23 June 2023]
  • An SABG member is proposing to make a joint seed order to Silverhill Seeds, as described in Bulletin 48/2 emailed to SABG members today. If you are an SABG member, didn’t receive this bulletin and are interested in joining in, please let me know and I’ll put you in touch. [10 April 2023]
  • The Auction of books (March 2023) has closed. Successful bidders will be contacted by email to arrange payment. [1 April 2023]
  • SABG members who have an email address (the great majority) should have received Bulletin 48/1, the first of a planned series of SABG Bulletins, which are intended to be smaller and more frequent than the Newsletters, and thus to provide more timely news and certain information for members only, such as members’ contact details, which is not appropriate to appear on the web-site. However, suitably edited versions will appear here. [30 March 2023]
  • An SABG member has brought my attention to Jacques Amand (https://jacquesamandintl.com/), which is a UK retail and wholesale supplier of a very wide range of bulbs, including many South African species. I have added them to our Links page [29 March 2023]

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 Newsletter 49 (26 August 2023)
  • SABG Bulb & Seed Exchange list (17 August 2023)
  • SABG Bulletin 48/3 (23 June 2023)
  • SABG Bulletin 48/2 (10 April 2023)
  • SABG Bulletin 48/1 (30 March 2023)

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 2023 meeting

Our next meeting will be on Sunday 22nd October 2023. Details of speakers etc. will follow.

Directions to the meeting hall. The doors will open at 10.00, and the meeting will close at about 14.30.

→ Read more...

More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.

Keep calm & grow bulbs

Other meetings

  • Saturday 22 October 2023: Nerine visit day
  • Saturday in March 2024: Lachenalia 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 49 (August 2023). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.
  • The latest bulletin is number 48/3 and was emailed to members on 23 June 2023.

Further information

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), an annual bulb and seed exchange, and a newsletter with three or four issues 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

Discussion

The following pages have discussion entries:

Bulb topics21:01 05/09/2023Richard White1 Comment
Hardiness of South African bulbs15:12 10/04/2023Richard White1 Comment
How to grow South African bulbs15:41 30/03/2023Richard White1 Comment

[Copyright © 2023 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]

start.txt · Last modified: 12:30 01/09/2023 by Richard White