Audrey Cain was born in Kenya in October 1936, and moved to the UK in the early sixties. On the steamer from Cape Town to the UK she met the chief engineer, whom she later married. He died in the nineties, but Audrey continued to live in their house in Woolston, where she grew many alpines – she was active in the AGS. She was also served on the SABG Committee for many years. Although she had been unable to get to a meeting for a long time, she had been very involved and enjoyed working on the plant sales table and talking with other members.

She was known for her collection of both hardy and tender bulbs, which she photographed when they flowered and documented their growth. She was an early pioneer in publishing these photos and associated information on the Web as her “BulbWeb” website. Although no longer available in its original form, a modified copy of Audrey Cain's BulbWeb has been restored. During the last ten years she had the foresight to ensure that her South African bulbs were gradually transferred to the care of Exbury Gardens.

Audrey died on 23rd January 2025. Her funeral was held at Southampton crematorium on the 13th February, attended by family, friends and two SABG members.

Audrey’s original BulbWeb web-site consisted of

• 1,466 photographs of bulbs in flower
• records of their flowering times, cultivation, etc.
• web pages built using DreamWeaver
  • using the Adobe Spry framework to handle data obtained from
  • a database built using FileMaker Pro.

Spry is no longer supported, and Dreamweaver and FileMaker are not used in the SABG web site, in which the use of proprietary commercial software is avoided. As a result, the original version is no longer online, although there is an archived copy of the home page at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517095240/http://www.bulbweb.co.uk/. This is only an automatically captured snapshot of the page itself, without the software to make the links work.

The SABG web site uses

• wiki pages hosted by Kualo, constructed and managed by DokuWiki
• and Perl CGI scripts to retrieve data from a relational database using MySQL/MariaDB.

An initial conversion exercise was completed to reinstate Audrey Cain's BulbWeb so that it can be searched and the pictures and notes viewed. I have modified a copy of the original BulbWeb home page, to include buttons for listing genera and searching by name (from which you can see the species within a chosen genus or matching a name search – it’s not pretty but it works; use your browser’s Back button to step back to the previous page).

An upgrade is being developed using the Python Flask web framework in order to provide better searching and display and easier maintenance.