Here are a couple of photographs of Bill doing what he liked best.
with his National Collection of Lachenalia
[Photo by Jeremy Spon, 7 April 2018]
The image of Bill in one of his greenhouses with the National Collection of Lachenalia also shows what he did to control light levels – shading for the summer and artificial lighting for the winter. The photo was taken the day before the SABG Spring meeting in 2018, the last one that Bill was able to attend.
[Click on the image for a larger version, which may be slow to appear, but can be enlarged further]
This display of just a few of Bill Squire’s plants was presented by Tony Bennett with the assistance of Leo Squire at the meeting of the Dorset Group of the Alpine Garden Society on the 1st November, 2018. A small but appropriate tribute to a wonderful man. Bill was well known as the former Chairman of the Dorset Group and long-standing Show Secretary for the Alpine Garden Society Wimborne Show, until very recently Chairman of the Southern African Bulb Group, and an active member of the Nerine and Amaryllid Society and the Scottish Rock Garden Club.
The next meeting of the Southern African Bulb Group will be the Spring meeting on Sunday 7th April 2019, at Badger Farm Community Centre, Winchester, Hampshire SO22 4QB (U.K.) Doors open at 10:00 a.m. and the meeting will finish at approximately 3 to 4 p.m.
The speaker for the morning session at approximately 11:00 a.m. will be Kit Strange from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who will give a demonstration of how bulbs are grown at Kew.
All who are interested in growing these plants will be welcome. There is an entry fee of £3.00, but parking is free. There will as usual be a plant display table, photos, short talks, plant sales (a good reason to arrive soon after 10:00!), and tea and coffee with biscuits. There will also be some books for sale. You are encouraged to bring along any plants you wish to display or sell, or digital photos to share with the audience. Bring your own lunch, or buy something at Sainsbury’s next door.
More details of our meetings, including directions for getting there, are given on the meetings page.
* Saturday 13th October 2018: SABG members are invited to the Exbury Nerine Visit Day organised by the Nerine and Amaryllid Society at the Five Arrows gallery, Exbury House gardens, Exbury, Southampton SO45 1AX, by kind invitation of Nicholas de Rothschild and Theo Herselman. For this (and other NAAS events) see the NAAS events page and please inform Theo or the NAAS Secretary Alison Corley alison.corley@btinternet.com if you wish to attend.
[gallery here soon]
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.
This is a new version of the SABG web site, which is intended to contain all the information from the original SABG web site (which will remain available for a while, but will not be updated). The URL (address) at which the web site can be found has not changed. It is www.sabg.tk or just sabg.tk. It is a secure web-site. If your web browser says it isn’t, go to https://sabg.tk.
This new version is hosted by a company whose servers are housed in an energy-efficient data centre powered by energy from green renewable sources. It’s implemented as a “wiki” in order to make it easier for people to contribute to it. The page “What's a wiki?” gives more details of how it works. Please email me with any problems or suggestions.
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).
[Copyright © 2018 by the Southern African Bulb Group and Richard White.]