Site Tools


start
SABG

Noticeboard

  • The SABG Spring meeting will be on Sunday 24th March 2024 at Badger’s Farm Community Centre. The speaker for this meeting is Timothy Walker, formerly the Director of Oxford Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum. The title of his talk is “From Diaz to Diamonds - Plant Hunting in South Africa”. “The western Cape region of South Africa is one of the most botanically diverse areas of the World. This talk takes a route from the southernmost tip of Africa to the border with Namibia looking at the plants and the ethnobotany of one of the most fascinating countries in the World.” More details below.
  • The SABG Autumn meeting has been booked for Sunday 20th October 2024 at Badger’s Farm Community Centre (a change to the originally published provisional date).
  • Newsletter no. 50 (March 2024) is available.
  • Bulletin no. 50/1 (15 March 2024) has been emailed.

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

Dates

  • 22nd March: deadline for joining Carl Garnham’s joint order to SA Bulb Co.
  • The SABG Spring 2024 meeting is on Sunday 24th March 2024
  • 5th April: deadline for joining Carl Garnham’s joint order to Shire Bulbs
  • The SABG Autumn meeting has been booked for Sunday 20th October 2024 (a change from the provisional date of 13th October)

News

  • An SABG member has drawn my attention to a study of the South African species of Ledebouria, which I have added to our Digital library [22 November 2023]
  • The November 2023 Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange has now finished. The material available was listed here here. [22 November 2023]
  • 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]

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 50/1 (15 March 2024)
  • SABG Newsletter 50 (7 March 2024)
  • SABG Bulletin 49/3 (3 November 2023)
  • SABG Ephemeral Seed and Bulb Exchange list (14 September 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.

Spring 2024 meeting

Our next meeting will be on Sunday 24th March 2024.

The speaker for this meeting is Timothy Walker. He is a very well known speaker, his lectures renowned for being both informative but also highly entertaining. He was formerly the Director of Oxford Botanic Garden & Harcourt Arboretum, which under his leadership won four gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. Currently he is a lecturer in Plant Sciences at Oxford University. His website gives a lot more details, including some video if you want to see examples of him speaking. He will give a talk called “From Diaz to Diamonds - Plant Hunting in South Africa”. “The western Cape region of South Africa is one of the most botanically diverse areas of the World.

This takes a route from the southernmost tip of Africa to the border with Namibia looking at the plants and the ethnobotany of one of the most fascinating countries in the World.” While not specifically about bulbs, it would I’m sure be very interesting as it could help us see the broader ecological context in which our bulbs grow in the wild.

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.

→ 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 16th March 2024: Lachenalia visit day
  • 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 50 (March 2024). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.
  • The latest bulletin is number 50/1 and was emailed to members on 15 March 2024.

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), 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

Discussion

The following pages have discussion entries:

Bulb topics04:46 26/03/2024Richard White4 Comments
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: 15:17 15/03/2024 by Richard White