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Spring meeting 2025
Our next meeting will be on Sunday 23rd March 2025. Graham Duncan will give a talk drawing on his 45 years at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, including Agapanthus and Lachenalia. The meeting, which will be a joint meeting with the NAAS, will be at Heath End Village Hall, Heath End Road, Baughurst RG26 5LU (near Tadley, between Basingstoke and Reading) https://www.heathendvillagehall.co.uk/
Note that this meeting is the day after the NAAS Lachenalia day at Exbury, which presents an opportunity for members from further afield to plan a longer trip to include both events. (The following SABG meeting on 19th October 2025 will return to our usual place, Badger Farm, Winchester, and by chance also follows the day after the NAAS Nerine day at Exbury. SABG members are invited to both NAAS events at Exbury. )
Newsletters and Bulletins
- The latest newsletter is number 52 (November 2024). You can read or download all the SABG newsletters from our list of Newsletters.
- The latest Bulletin is number 52/1 (24 December 2024).
Bulb & Seed Exchange
- The November Seed and Bulb Exchange 2024 has now finished and Jon Evans has posted the bulbs and seeds to members who requested them.
- The next Bulb & Seed Exchange is the main Summer Bulb & Seed Exchange planned for August – September 2025.
- The lists of what was available in previous Exchanges can be seen at Bulbs and seeds distributed in SABG Bulb & Seed Exchanges
Meetings
- The SABG Spring meeting will be held jointly with the NAAS on Sunday 23rd March 2025 at Heath End Village Hall, Heath End Road, Baughurst, near Tadley. More details will be announced when available.
- The SABG Autumn meeting will be on Sunday 19th October 2025 at Badger Farm Community Centre, Winchester.
Website address
The old sabg.tk domain has expired. Although apparently still visible, this cannot be guaranteed and soon it will not be recognised and will not give access to our web-site. We have been using sabg.uk since 2022. Please make sure you change any old bookmarks (“favourites”) to sabg.uk as soon as possible.
![//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.]")
Other dates
By chance both of the next two dates are the day before our next two SABG meetings on 23rd March and 19th October respectively.
- SABG members are invited to join the NAAS visit to the Lachenalia collection in the Five Arrows Gallery and the glasshouses at Exbury Gardens, SO45 1AZ on Saturday 22nd March 2025 at 10.30am for tea and biscuits and 11:00am for the Gallery opening. Further details at http://www.nerineandamaryllidsociety.co.uk/forthcoming-events
- 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 18th October 2025, details as above.
- STOP PRESS! I have heard that Graham Duncan may be giving a talk in Sheffield in October 2025. This will probably be similar to the talk he will give at Tadley, and will obviously be a chance for members living in the North to see it and meet him. More details here when available!
News
- Sue Bedwell, aged 76, died peacefully in her sleep at the end of November in Sobell House Hospice in Oxford where she had been for about a week. Sue was a long time member of the SABG, formerly a member of the SABG Committee and was always very helpful to the group, looking after our catering supplies and sometimes making good suggestions for speakers for our meetings. She was also a member of several other plant-related groups including the Nerine and Amaryllid Society and the Alpine Garden Society, being a very active member of the Oxford AGS Group, winning many awards and 1st prizes in their shows. She will be sadly missed by all who knew her.
Caroline Stone of the Nerine and Amaryllid Society wrote: “Sue had been a great support to the Society for many years serving two terms as Chair. She always helped out with the Society displays at the Malvern Autumn Show and her wide range of plants were always a big help with the mixed display that made up part of the stand. Often she brought tiny and rather fragile plants that were a worry to place but very interesting for people to see, but also Clivia and Haemanthus as well as Autumn flowering Narcissus. Only about 8 weeks ago she was still gardening, although finding her energy levels depleted. Sue was a proper character and a great plantswoman as well as friend to many of us.”
Sue’s funeral was held in the Oxford area on Monday 6th January 2025, followed by a reception at Waterperry Gardens. - The list of available bulbs and seeds for the November Seed and Bulb Exchange 2024 has been published. Deadline for requests is 16th November. [Jon Evans, 3 November 2024]
- 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 Exchange page. [Jon Evans, 10 September 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 52/1 (24 December 2024)
- SABG Newsletter 52 (5 November 2024)
- SABG Ephemeral Seed & Bulb Exchange list (3 November 2024)
- SABG Bulletin 51/2 (30 September 2024)
- SABG Bulletin 51/1 (16 August 2024)
- SABG Newsletter 51 (31 July 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.
Spring 2025 meeting
Our next meeting will be on Sunday 23rd March 2025. This will be a joint meeting with the NAAS. Graham Duncan will give a talk drawing on his 45 years experience at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, probably including Agapanthus and perhaps also Lachenalia.
The meeting will be at Heath End Village Hall, Heath End Road, Baughurst (near Tadley, between Basingstoke and Reading) RG26 5LU https://www.heathendvillagehall.co.uk/ (The following meeting on 19th October 2025 will return to our usual place, Badger Farm, Winchester.)
Further details will be posted here in due course, including Directions to the meeting hall.
The provisional timetable is: The doors will open at 10.00, and the meeting will close at about 15.00. SABG and NAAS members, their guests and visitors are welcome. There will be a small admission charge. Parking is free.
More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.
Other meetings
- Saturday 22nd March 2025: Lachenalia Day
- Saturday 18th October 2025: Nerine 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 the NAAS Secretary Rosemary Walsh rosemary.walsh1@btinternet.com if you wish to attend so that numbers can be estimated.
- Saturday 1st November 2025: NAAS AGM, Holton Village Hall, near Oxford
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
- We will soon start an online forum.
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 Exchange 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 Richard White richard@sabg.uk. See How to join the SABG.
- For enquiries about the Bulb & Seed Exchanges, email Jon Evans jon@sabg.uk. See Bulb & Seed Exchange.
- 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 |
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[Copyright © 2024 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]
start.txt · Last modified: 14:21 22/01/2025 by Richard White
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